Sun., July 13: Tainted Love

Sunday is karaoke night at Market Bar-B-Que. A block before I got there, I passed a woman waiting for the bus in a motorized wheelchair, sporting a santa hat, with a cigarette dangling from the side of her lips. You wouldn’t happen to have a transfer?

There was a neon sign attached to the building, featuring a three-armed pig in a chef’s hat and apron, and it creaked and whined as if it was conveying the general desolation of the area: a stretch of blocks that looked like something left over from the set of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Inside, a young man with a replica of a patron bottle hanging from his necklace was performing a Drake song, and he was followed by an older man in sunglasses and fedora who announced he would be performing an original piece. The instrumental kicked and he began: “You saying chivalry is deaaaaad? I need some m——-f——-g heaaaaad.”

I sat near a group of people that assured me that Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian celebrated at Market after their wedding. That isn’t the only bit of gossip passed along. A couple swore to me they knew precisely how Kevin Love broke his hand, and it wasn’t, as he claimed — when he informed the press two weeks after the fact — from doing knuckle pushups. The name of another establishment emerged, but was quickly contradicted. The year they mentioned was the wrong year for the injury. They pointed me to another woman. Ask her, her cousin’s father owns the place. But when I asked, the woman appeared as confused by the insinuation as I was excited to hear about it.

Whatever happened to Love’s hand, the situation was … unusual. In the wake of the injury, there were whispers among many in the organization about his lack of integrity and commitment, about his inability to lead by example and command the respect of a locker room. One of the lines of thought about Love is that he’s aloof, and his teammates reciprocate that cold indifference. They’ve long regarded him as more invested in plotting his next move than in his current situation.

J.J. Barea — who has an inflated sense of his own worth as a basketball player, but also has a championship pedigree — has gotten into three public spats with Love over the past two seasons. At season’s close, when Rubio was asked about Love’s potential departure for greener pastures, he gave a lukewarm endorsement of Love’s talent while questioning whether he was ever the right leader for the team. If Love’s teammates want to keep playing basketball with him, they sure have been impressively coy about it.

Then there’s this:

It’s a chart of the best players to miss the playoffs their first six seasons in a row. “Best” here is defined by most Win Shares accumulated over those six seasons. The top four names share some obvious commonalities: they played for organizations that were in total disarray during their time there; they were defensively limited power forwards who were asked to play out of position at times; they put up gaudy numbers, but would be tagged in fan parlance as prototypical “stat-padders.”

It’s not a list that inspires confidence in Kevin Love’s eliteness.

Then there’s Love’s defense. Opponents shot 57 percent on shots at the rim defended by Love, the league’s highest rate for a defender who defended at least six shots at the rim per game. Love is rotating to the basket on defense just fine; he’s simply not altering any shots once he’s there. That 57 percent conversion rate put him in the company of players like Jrue Holiday, Rodney Stuckey, and Jordan Crawford. Essentially, Love defended the paint like a wing. Opponents openly mocked him.

A friend of mine calls Love “a 43-minute star.” He’s in elite company for nearly the entire game, until the last five minutes, when he’s downright average. Love’s “close and late” numbers support the theory. His shooting percentages dip from everywhere on the floor, including the line. That certainly could explain the Timberwolves’ dreadful record in tight games this past season.

So Love’s teammates dislike him, his organization questions his integrity and commitment, he shoots worse with the game in the balance, and he defends the paint like a wing … sounds like someone you wouldn’t ever trade young, top draft picks away to get.

Yes, but…

Playing with better teammates will allow Love to split his movements on defense between contesting shots and rebounding instead of focusing strictly on the defensive glass. It will also allow Love to be more aggressive on defense, because if he is playing with, say, LeBron and Kyrie Irving, his team won’t collapse on the offensive end if he’s sitting on the bench with his fourth foul. Last year, Minnesota outscored opponents by 5.9 points per 100 possessions with Love on the floor; when he was off it, they had one of the worst point differentials in the league.

Love’s numbers should dip in the fourth quarter. He’s never played with an appropriately talented wing or a guard who can score (Kevin Martin being, by far, the best over the years), and has to force things against defenses that collapse on him because he’s often the only legitimate threat on the floor.

More encouraging news: the last four years Chris Bosh was on the Raptors, they had a defensive rating average of 109 — the same as Love’s last four years on the Timberwolves. Bosh suddenly jumped to a much-better-than-league-average defensive rating when he moved to Miami — in part because he could conserve energy on offense, and had more help with defensive rotations from competent teammates. The same can hold true for Love.