This report comes to you via Zach Lowe and NBC Sports:
Cleveland and Boston had trade talks for Love at the deadline, though they died with Boston offering a low-ball package the Cavs wouldn’t consider, according to several league sources.
NBC Sports adds this context:
Love could help them win now, Wiggins was years away, and LeBron wanted Love.
So let’s unpack this.
First of all, Cleveland wasn’t going to trade Love away for a bag of basketballs. On the other hand, there’s no way that Danny Ainge is going to call up David Griffin and lead with his best offer.
From that angle, this is a huge non-story. Ainge made a pitch for Love and Cleveland apparently didn’t want to make a counter-offer. Stuff like this happens all the time.
But there’s a more interesting angle to this. Does LeBron expect to be consulted on any trade involving Love? How would he react if Love was traded against his wishes?
As the article points out, LeBron practically demanded Kevin Love, and that resulted in Flip Saunders getting a much better deal for Love than he would’ve otherwise gotten (sans LeBron interference, the Celtics offer was probably the best Flip was going to get).
One cannot imagine that LeBron would have liked to find out that Olympic superfriend Kevin Love had been traded for some combination of picks and rotation players via twitter. It seems likely that he would see this as an assault on the leverage that he has been carefully assembling in order to be the league’s first de facto player/president of basketball operations.
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