Kevin Love has been tearing up the league as a rebounder and has had his name tossed around all over the place since early on in this season. He is even an All-Star and serves as a natural follow-up to my recent article on Zach Randolph.

The 22 year-old is a statistical marvel, that’s for sure. After 56 game, he’s averaging over 21 ppg and 15.5 rpg, a mark which leads the league. Were the season to finish today, he’d become the first player since Moses Malone in the 82-83 season to average 20+ ppg and 15+ rpg. That’s simply incredible.

He’s duking it out with Zach Randolph to be the best offensive rebounder in the league at 4.7 per game and he’s the only player in the league averaging 10+ DRPG at 10.8, better than Randolph, Dwight Howard and Blake Griffin. 

We’ll come back to numbers in a bit, but let’s talk about the player for a second.

Love sort of defies belief; those offensive rebounds come with him being a prolific perimeter shooter, flying in the face of conventional wisdom used to defend various players and their deficient rebounding.  It’s pretty incredible that he’s a decent offensive rebounder as a result of this, let alone one of the two best in the entire league.

He’s very much a different sort of player than many of us thought could really come together, and there really isn’t an appropriate parallel for him.

His All-Star selection is contentious because his team is abysmally ineffective at both ends of the floor and has only won 13 games thus far, so people question his overall impact, the pace of the team (the Wolves are the fastest team in the league at the moment) and everything else they can think of in order to attack that selection. 

Why was he selected over Randolph, LaMarcus Aldridge and Steve Nash? If he’s so good, why doesn’t his team win more? He’s so bad defensively that his offensive impact is overstated. These are some of the many things that have been said about Kevin Love to try and demean what he’s accomplishing. People want to call him a stat-padder, but ultimately, he can only do so much. 

So let’s address his defense first. Love isn’t a great defender. At a glance at his normal stats, you don’t see reams of blocks or steals. The advanced defensive stats don’t favor him (the team is worse per 100 possessions when he’s on the floor, he’s at 108 DRTG, etc) and an eye test doesn’t show him looking great at man defense either. 

He’s 6’9 in shoes given the average shoe adjustment of +1.25”, so he doesn’t have a height advantage to work with.  There are some rumblings that he’s grown since he was drafted, but I have no proof of that, only fan commentary.  Either way, he’s no taller than 6’10.  He obviously isn’t a stunning explosive athlete, and his wingspan is mediocre: +3.5”, above-average for the normal person but below average for an NBA player and below average for his position. 

He’s not a good shot blocker, doesn’t play passing lanes a lot and he’s got a height disadvantage on many nights. This isn’t the recipe for a dominant defender, and that’s fine. He is not, however, much of a positive defender. He has nearly two defensive win shares so far this season, which is decent overall, but he gets a block every three games, a steal a little more often than every other game and if he’s taken a charge this year, I haven’t seen it. 

He and Zach Randolph make the fewest defensive plays per game of any PF playing 30+ mpg (that’s steals, blocks and charges). This accounts for help defense, to a point, and it has flaws as an analysis but it squares with what everyone says: Love is a bad defender. 

Love doesn’t even foul a lot, which is actually a problem given his other defensive failings.  If he were to give a few more hard fouls every now and again, he might well average three PF/g (around an extra foul per game) but he could potentially be a more valuable player defensively. This also squares with the idea that his effort is a little lacking at that end of the floor. Everything you can think of points to the idea that he’s a bad defender, so we can’t really escape that point. He is, however, 7^th in the league in win shares per 48 minutes, despite playing on a horrifically bad team and playing poor defense. This means that, like Charles Barkley before him, his offense is just so good that it overcomes his defense to a point. 

Let me clarify that with some numbers. Love is posting 0.212 Win Shares per 48 Minutes, which is outstanding. That’s comparable to Dwyane Wade, statistically speaking, as well as Al Horford and Ryan Anderson. And Steve Novak. So you can see that just using that number is a little nuts, but it does illustrate a point, especially if you toss out players who’ve played less than 50 games. Obviously, Love isn’t as good as Wade, but statistically speaking, he’s been of similar value to his team as those guys.  Anyone with a brain would take Wade over Love for many reasons, but the man is having an absolutely incredible season right now and it would be wrong to dismiss that simply because he’s a weak defender on a bad team. His offensive value, and the value he brings as a defensive rebounder, is undeniable. 

LaMarcus Aldridge is posting .167, Zach Randolph .169 and Blake Griffin .149. There is a reason that Love is so far ahead of those guys. His ORTG is 124; Aldridge, Randolph and Griffin are respectively posting 114, 112 and 111. That gap in offensive efficiency and value is significant, and coupled with his humongous rebounding makes him a very valuable player. 

One common complaint about him is that he sags off of his man defensively to chase rebounds. I’ve seen him do this a few times and get burned as a result. Rodman started doing this in the early 90s and it made him a less effective help defender than he’d once been. It’s also possible that this is a coaching tactic because Kurt Rambis knows that Love is far and away the best rebounder on the team, and because Darko Milicic is ineffective on the glass. 

So he’s a bad defender with some potential effort problems at that end and maybe his coach has him doing something that might affect his defense a little (not enough to make a huge difference though, honestly). 

So let’s talk about his team.  For one, the best defender on the team plays 25 minutes per game because he’s not good enough to stay on the floor longer than that. Darko is foul-prone and useless offensively. You can defend him as much as you like in terms of his character, but he’s working on his 6^th season under 50% TS… not even under league average, just raw TS%. That’s horrific. He’s bad. He’s a terrible FT shooter with inconsistent range and a fairly weak overall offensive game. 

But Darko is a good defender and his absence from playing significant minutes hurts the team. 

The Wolves could be a lot better on this end of the floor if they had defensive-minded role players on the team who ate up minutes for them, but they don’t. They have a terribly mismatched, poorly constructed roster without a coach who can drag out the best in them defensively. 

It’s not an excuse for Love personally, but his defense isn’t so bad that the team couldn’t be at least passable if the rest of the roster was filled with moderately competent defenders playing decent minutes. In effect, volume defensive rebounding is actually the biggest contribution he can make to the team’s defensive effort at this point (apart from magically turning into a good help defender, which won’t happen), which may well be why Rambis has him playing as he does now. 

Love’s rebounding is not inflated by pace to any great extent; he is, by rate, the best defensive rebounder in the league and second in the league in offensive rebounding rate as well. This means that he’d be an absolutely dominant rebounder on any team, and the difference in his raw averages on a slower and/or more efficient team probably wouldn’t be enough to bring him down the full 1.7 rebounds per game or so to Dwight Howard’s current level. He’s having a phenomenal year, so that argument can go away quietly into oblivion, where it belongs.  

So we’ve talked about defense and we’ve talked about rebounding; now it’s time to talk about offense. If Love is so good with his 59.5% TS and 124 offensive rating, why are the Wolves 24^th in the league (that is the 7^th worst team) at offensive efficiency?

Well, part of it is that he doesn’t touch the ball enough. At 22.9%, he isn’t getting the ball nearly enough, and Michael Beasley’s rocking a 27.9% usage rate while scoring at below league average efficiency. Despite Love shooting an outstanding 51.5% eFG, the Wolves as a team are actually well below league average in team eFG%, which means the REST of the team is actually pretty bad on offense.

There’s only so much one player can do if he isn’t getting the ball a lot because the perimeter players are shooting poorly and too much. 

They don’t have good guard play and Beasley shoots more than is healthy for the team.  Minnesota also turns the ball over more than any other team in the league, which doesn’t help their case either. They don’t take care of the ball well and that’s a big part of not only their offensive troubles, but their problems on defense as well. 

Love, for reference, is not a huge part of this problem. At 11.1% TOV, he isn’t turning the ball over enough to matter at all. He’s averaging just 2.2 turnovers per 36 minutes. 

The Wolves are a great offensive rebounding team; surprise! Well, no, not really. We know Love is an amazing offensive rebounder (he actually led the league in OREB% as a rookie in 08-09). And actually most of the bigs that the Wolves cycle through have done well per-minute on that end. Darko is a pretty good offensive rebounder (just a weak-sauce defensive rebounder) and both Kosta Koufos and Nikola Pekovic in 10-12 minutes per game for the Wolves as offensive rebounders, if nothing else. The Wolves are below average at drawing fouls as well, which also hurts them offensively.

Now, Love shoots a couple of threes per game and slaughters his FTs at nearly 88%, so you know that he isn’t hurting their offensive efficiency because he’s contributing in a variety of ways (perimeter shooting, made free throws and offensive boards, mostly).  And he’s the team’s leading scorer. He could stand to do what Dwight Howard has done this season, which is to see his efficiency drop a little in order to take a few more chances and risks in order to score more… but he’d need his guard corps to cooperate and they haven’t really done so thus far.

The Wolves have relied upon such august and distinguished players as Luke Ridnour, Jonny Flynn (30 games played) and Sebastian Telfair (34 games played) to be their point guards. That is not a winning recipe. Flynn isn’t very good even when he does play, Telfair is an obvious bust and Ridnour is a 6^th man, not a primary playmaker. Given all of that, it shouldn’t come as a major surprise that the team is poor offensively even despite the contributions of Love.

Love is a very good player. I’d personally have gone with any of Randolph, Aldridge or Griffin over Love on the All-Star team because of team success (Portland and Memphis are over .500 and the Clippers have gone 20-22 since starting the season 1-13, which is actually a pretty sharp turnaround that follows the incredible play of Blake Griffin, who has been averaging about 23, 13 and 4 since December. 

Having said that, though, we shouldn’t be raising too much of a fuss about Kevin Love making the team. He’s statistically dominant and he is a player around whom a winning team can be built. There are a lot of players who couldn’t really do anything at all with this roster, even get them near .500, so that’s not a huge deal.

Love isn’t the dominant two-way frontcourt player that many look for, but then again, neither are Griffin or Randolph. They simply have the luxury of playing on better teams at the moment.