Maybe it’s the longish curls dammed at his forehead by the Springsteen-lite headband, or the biker mustache that has grown into a beard that makes him look like he’s five weeks into a boozy, do-nothing vacation that might never end, but Kevin Love seems more at ease in Cleveland than he did last year. That big contract he signed over the summer put all the exodus chatter to rest, but for most of the 2014-15 season, fans and media were murmuring about Love opting out of LeBron James’ Cavs 2.0 project early. 

With good reason: there was a downtroddenness to the All-Star forward on the court, where he spent a lot of time standing at the three-point line, a glorified floor-spacing mechanism, LeBron and Kyrie Irving orchestrated an offense that barely included him. Circa February 2015, Love was headed to Boston or Los Angeles, to hear the rumormongers tell it. He was distraught, uncertain that if championship contention meant playing the role of distant third banana and soaking up LeBron’s weird passive-aggression, he really wanted to bother with it. What is a title worth anyway, if you don’t get any credit for it and the process of attaining it isn’t fun? 

In the space of an offseason, Love’s vexation has visibly faded. He’s finding his place in a team that’s finding its groove. The Cavs, who had nearly half their roster nursing some ailment or another during the summer months, figured to build slowly out of the gate this year, but instead they’ve bounded out to an 8-3 start, in part because they have approached the regular season with specific purpose. Having proven they can handle the broadly lousy Eastern Conference even at considerably less than full strength—this is a team that swept the Hawks without Love and with a one-legged Irving—they’ve set some sensible goals for themselves: get and keep everyone healthy, let LeBron coast through his age 31 season, and work to make Love an integral part of the offense.

Those last two things are twinned, and it’s working out swimmingly for both parties. LeBron has a habit of saying laudable things he doesn’t back up with actions—his idea of leading last year’s team seemed to boil down to embarrassing his teammates when they screwed up—but when he claimed in late October that Love would be the “main focus” of the Cavs offense, he was only mildly exaggerating.

As ever, LeBron’s presence still orders the Cavaliers when they have the ball. Most possessions revolve around him in some sense or another. But he’s making a point to get Love involved, and David Blatt has installed some simple picks and cuts that put Love in positions in which he’s comfortable. He catches the ball near the block more frequently, and he’s less static without it. His rebounds are back up to their near-league-leading levels because he’s playing closer to the basket. His shooting numbers, a little surprisingly, are down—that 51.8 true shooting percentage is ghastly—but they will come up. Love is too skilled and the looks are too good for his touch to fail him for long. Most importantly, for the first time in Cleveland, he’s being depended upon, treated like the immensely talented player he is.

In the meantime, LeBron is enjoying leisurely dominance reminiscent of his friend Chris Paul, who since about age 25 has been known to keep himself in third gear during the regular season before unleashing the incandescent being known as Playoff Chris Paul on the league in May. LeBron is doing something similar. His hand is always on his team’s rudder, and he bursts into the foreground of games when the Cavs are struggling, but he has been largely content to facilitate, take a couple offensive possessions off, call for a seat and a Gatorade when he needs it. If you take out the marathon double-overtime contest against Milwaukee, in which LeBron played 45 minutes, his floor time is as low as it has ever been. For as little as he and Blatt seemed on the same page last season, it’s clear they talked in training camp about how to keep LeBron fresh for the postseason. They have a regimen, and they’re sticking to it. 

The Cavs aren’t humming along at anything like full bore. They’ve had a nice opening run, but they have also played a relatively easy schedule and somnambulated through a few games before rescuing them late. There are challenges ahead. Iman Shumpert’s eventual return from a bum wrist will be seamless, since he’s a player who gets in where he fits in, but whenever Kyrie Irving graces the starting lineup again, the offense will have to be reshaped. By extension, so will Love’s game. His touches and points will inevitably dip.

But the regular season, for a team on the title hunt, is about developing preparedness for what lies ahead, game-by-game. That takes keeping a keen focus on the present while not failing to forget the ultimate goal. Right now, the Cavaliers are loading up their forward with confidence, trying to help him find his best self while he has the space to do so. Love landed in the middle of a frenzy in the summer of 2014—LeBron’s homecoming, a rookie head coach, a score-first point guard who had never played with good teammates, a drastically rebuilt roster—and he rode his own confusion to an unsatisfying year. Now, he’s being given the chance to acclimate while also, by happy coincidence, lessening LeBron’s workload. If by the time Irving’s gets himself right, Love is feeling positive and playing well, then that’s step one on the Cavs’ championship to-do list ticked off. Love isn’t reminding anyone of the player he was in Minnesota yet, but he’s engaged and smiling again. That’s a fine start.