Kevin Love will have a new role for the Cleveland Cavaliers this fall, but his coach wasn’t the one that broke it to the now-center this season. That honor goes to LeBron James, who either had some inside information or at least gleaned it before everyone else.
The Cavs will certainly look different this fall, with Derrick Rose, Jae Crowder and Dwyane Wade in the starting lineup and Isaiah Thomas rehabbing his way to a spot in the rotation at some point this season. That means a lot of shuffling — Tristan Thompson and J.R. Smith to the bench, much to their chagrin — including a move of Kevin Love to center.
Love, however, wasn’t the first on his team to know he’d be moving to the five. In fact, he said during an interview with ESPN that Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue never really got a chance to pitch Love on the move at all.
“I guess it wasn’t really presented in the first place,” Love said. “I knew there was a possibility that I may or may not be playing more of the 5.”
In fact, he only found out about the move when LeBron James told him it was happening during a stoppage in practice.
“But a funny thing happened the third day of practice,” Love explained. “I had asked about a certain play on the defensive end and whether it was the different coverages on the 4 or 5 man, and ‘Bron kind of stopped me and goes, ‘You know you’re gonna be starting at the 5, right?’
“So I kind of looked at him and didn’t really fully understand that was going to be the case. Not that I would have trained or done anything different. I just would have started wrapping my head around it more. So that’s when I kind of knew that was coming into play, and I slowly and surely started to pick it up.”
It’s hard to say that there’s any malice here, but it’s clear that LeBron was a bit more in touch with the scheme the Cavs would eventually settle on than his teammates. Like many teams in the NBA, there will be a lot of moving pieces to sort out before the team grasps the changes that are happening here, something that’s certainly complicated by James’ ankle injury.
But as is always the case with the Cavs, it’s not the opening night roster and performance that matters, but what the team looks like around April when the games really start to count.
