INDEPENDENCE: When Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue looks at Kevin Love’s limited number of shots in the first two rounds of the playoffs, he said he sees growth.
Growth for Love, a four-time All-Star, and for the team.
Matchups and tight defense limited Love’s scoring opportunities during the Cavs’ sweep of the Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference semifinals, but he found other ways to contribute. He may have proved most valuable in helping trap Raptors stars DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry.
While Lue vows to get Love more involved in next week’s conference finals against the winner of the Boston Celtics-Washington Wizards series, Love didn’t complain during a recent talk with Lue.
“I told him, ‘We’re 8-0. I don’t mind it.’ If I get five or six shots, if I get 15 shots, it don’t matter to me, as long as we win,” Love said Thursday after practice at Cleveland Clinic Courts. “I’ve been in this position before, we’re having success so I’m happy. Feel good.”
When Love signed a five-year, $110 million contract with the Cavaliers on July 1, 2015, he said his priorities were “happiness, winning and money.” Those goals are being fulfilled with the defending champions even as he averaged 12 points per game against the Raptors after scoring 15.5 in a first-round sweep of the Indiana Pacers.
Love has attempted 9.9 field goals per game during the playoffs after averaging 14.5 during the regular season. Through eight games, he’s averaging 13.8 points, a playoff career-high 9.1 rebounds and 1.5 assists.
“When you come here it’s all about one thing, and that’s just trying to win a championship,” Lue said. “However you gotta do it, you gotta do it. And it’s about sacrifice. Scoring is not the most important thing, it’s the small things that Kevin’s been doing that goes uncharted. I thought for what we needed, defensively, rotations, rebounding the basketball, trapping pick and rolls, trapping on the catch, doing what he’s supposed to do, he was great.
“Offensively he hasn’t gotten a lot of touches. That’s on me to get him more involved. What we had going offensively was working, and we had to stay with it to get to 8-0. He understands that. In this next series, we have some matchups he can definitely take advantage of and it’s on me to make sure we do that.”
Lue said the Raptors traded for Serge Ibaka in February to try to slow down Love after he took advantage of Patrick Patterson and Luis Scola in the 2016 conference finals.
“Maybe we didn’t feature Kevin enough against Toronto, maybe we showed ’em too much respect and that’s on me,” Lue said.
Love said Patterson and Ibaka weren’t giving him many open looks in the corner, but he knows drawing the defense’s attention helped the Cavs.
“That allowed us to play downhill, allowed those guys to do their thing,” he said of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. “I was trying to be as best I could defensively. We looked at a lot of film. I was able to trap Lowry when he played [in the first two games], DeRozan quite a bit. Our game plan has been great. I’ve just been trying to be my best in that role. Sometimes it’s going to be like that.”
If the Celtics win the other semifinal, Love will face center Kelly Olynyk, who dislocated Love’s left shoulder as they battled for a rebound in Game 4 of the first round in 2015.
Asked if anything will carry over from 2015, when Love initially called Olynyk “bush league” for causing the injury that required surgery, Love didn’t mention Olynyk’s name. Olynyk later apologized via text.
“Even right now with Washington and Boston, it’s like a slugging match out there. It’s two physical teams. I think you’ll see that even more in the next round,” Love said. “Even last round I think both coaches were saying the more physical team was going to win and more often than not, that holds true.”
But Love admitted how important the 2015 Boston series was for him. At age 28, he’s now played nine seasons and that was his first experience in the playoffs.
“More than anything, just [it] can all be taken away from me so fast. We don’t take any of this for granted,” Love said. “I look back at that game a lot. That was my first taste, came back, re-signed, got all we could handle last year and looking forward to it this year, too.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Cavs blog at www.ohio.com/cavs. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.