T10YL - Kevin Love to Cleveland

Along with Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett to Minnesota. And the 76ers are here, for some reason.

The Names: Cleveland Cavaliers receive: Kevin Love (from Minnesota). Minnesota Timberwolves receive: Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett (from Cleveland), Thaddeus Young (from Philadelphia), $6.3 million trade exception. Philadelphia 76ers receive: Luc Mbah a Moute and Alexey Shved (from Minnesota), 2015 Miami 1st-round pick (from Cleveland) (top-10 protected, conveyed as #24 in 2016 Draft, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot selected). 

The Team Context: The Cavaliers were making enough trades in 2014 that we’ve already mentioned the big event of the basketball year, which was the homecoming of Lebron James. That’s fine, why would we not mention it repeatedly? Cleveland was signing a 30-year-old Lebron James as a free agent. There’s not much else to talk about when evaluating a team’s circumstances, but there’s a chance that in ignoring the less-interesting pieces we’ve actually understated how seismic of a shift this was.

Lebron had obviously been a Cavalier before and the team was successful in those years, going 66-16 in 2008-09 and 61-21 in 2009-10 on teams that we remember as being completely lacking in supporting talent. There’s a reason for this collective memory; in the first season after Lebron took his talents to South Beach, the Cavaliers plummeted to finish 19-63 under the leadership of old friends Ramon Sessions and Antawn Jamison. That wasn’t all bad, as the now-tanking Cavaliers suddenly had the second-best odds to win the 2011 NBA Draft Lottery (19.9% odds to get the top pick). They ended up coming in fourth (selecting Tristan Thompson), but had a stroke of fortune by winning the lottery with the other first-round pick they owned (from the Clippers, 2.8% chance of top pick) and selecting Kyrie Irving. Cleveland improved by two wins the next season, finishing with the third-best lottery odds and selecting Dion Waiters fourth overall. A further three win improvement in 2012-13 brought the Cavaliers’ record to a still-paltry 24-58 and still resulted in the third-best lottery odds, but resulted in a victory and the top overall selection in 2013. This was a confusing draft, with no consensus number one prospect, but it was still a surprise to see Cleveland select the Canadian Anthony Bennett with the first pick. 

After a few miserable seasons in Northeast Ohio, the two most recent of which had been capped with Miami Heat championships, the 2013-14 season started to show green shoots. Irving and Thompson both appeared to be serious NBA players, growing into team-leading roles at ages 21 and 22. This was still only good enough for a 33-49 record, but that was a nine-win improvement on the prior year’s team. In a loaded 2014 draft, it would be a bummer to miss out on adding another talented prospect to the core, but Cleveland’s ninth-best lottery odds (1.7% chance of winning) were at least more representative of their current stature as a team on the rise. 

So when the Cavaliers won the 2014 lottery, it sparked some outrage among fans who couldn’t believe that a largely incompetent franchise would be bailed out by fortune so many times. This year, there was a clear selection at #1 in the Drake-immortalized Andrew Wiggins. 

Before we dive too deep into Wiggins, or Bennett for that matter, we should circle to the Minnesota Timberwolves, who have to be one of the last franchises that hasn’t been covered on Trades Ten Years Later but are a very easy one to summarize. In 1989, the Timberwolves were founded and quickly became perennial losers. In 1995, they drafted Kevin Garnett, who was so incredibly talented and competitive that he took Minnesota to the playoffs by the 1996-97 season and took them back every year through 2003-04 through sheer force of will. Unfortunately, it took until that final year for them to win a single playoff series, with the highwater mark coming in Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell’s first seasons in Minnesota as the Wolves surged to a Western Conference Finals. When Cassell was traded to the Clippers and Sprewell declined Minnesota’s $21 million extension because he had a family to feed, it was over as quickly as it started – the Wolves had yet to return to the playoffs by the time of this trade.

In the ten years since Minnesota last made the playoffs, Garnett had been traded to Boston and the team had acquired their second great player in franchise history. Kevin Love was a 5th overall draft pick in 2008 and made his first All-Star team in 2010-2011, when he also won Most Improved Player. As he blossomed personally on a team that never had a winning record at any point during his tenure, Love grew increasingly dissatisfied with the organization. 

I’m at risk of diving too deep into Kevin Love too, so let’s get the Philadelphia 76ers out of the way and confirm that they were still tanking. They had just made seven picks in the 2014 draft and only two were going to play for the team that season. The 76ers were so deeply into this particular mud that they didn’t have a choice but to keep doubling down on the strategy, at least in the near-term. 

The Player Context: I wanted to say that Thaddeus Young was the “resident old guy” left on the 76ers roster, but that’s just because I think of him as an old NBA player in 2024 (still out there as a free agent!). At the time of this trade, he had just turned 26, which actually still made him the “resident old guy” on a 76ers roster that generally skewed young (pun unintended and unwanted, yet unavoidable). More salient than Young’s calendar age was his link to a different era of Philadelphia basketball; while never “great,” his teams were “good” enough to make it to the playoffs in four different seasons. He participated in 30 playoff games as a 76er and even won 12 of them. 

Clearly, they needed to get him out of here.

Kevin Love was born in the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Kevin’s father Stan was a member of the Beach Boys family who was a Hall of Fame basketball player at the University of Oregon, and Kevin’s decision to attend UCLA instead of following in his father’s footsteps was not without its detractors. Love and Russell Westbrook led UCLA to a Final Four appearance in 2008, where they lost to a Memphis Tigers team whose season would eventually be vacated due to NCAA violations. In the 2008 Draft, Westbrook was selected fourth (by the Seattle SuperSonics, which became the Oklahoma City Thunder about five minutes later) and Love was selected fifth (by the Memphis Grizzlies, who traded him to the Timberwolves about four minutes later).

Love was immediately impactful at the NBA level as an elite rebounder and shooter. By 2010, he was good enough at these skills to achieve cartoonish feats, like when he had 31 points and 31 rebounds in a game against the Knicks to record the NBA’s first 30/30 game since 1982 or when he recorded 53 consecutive double-doubles. After that season, Love sought a five-year designated player extension from the Timberwolves, but the team didn’t want to offer him the maximum contract. As a concession for only signing a four-year deal, Love was able to negotiate a player option on the final year, which would position him to be a free agent after the 2014-15 season. “Did I want the five years? Of course.” Love said. “I like the direction the team is headed. I like the youth. I like the pieces, like we’re knocking at the door and we’re close in a lot of games.” 

As we now know, the Wolves were not particularly close to anything good. Failing to secure Love long-term exacerbated pre-existing tensions in the relationship, and by December 2012 Adrian Wojnarowski was reporting that Love was “unsure about Timberwolves’ future.” After another All-NBA season in 2013-14 where Minnesota had only improved to a 40-42 record, Love made it clear that he would be opting out and that the Wolves would not have another opportunity to trade him.

We’ll return to the Kevin Love trade saga after discussing the two other departing Wolves. Luc Mbah a Moute was a Cameroonian prince at the village-level, which is a less impressive domain than you might associate with a “prince” but was still sufficient to earn Mbah a Moute the “Fresh Prince of Westwood” nickname when he played at UCLA. Mbah a Moute got to UCLA two years before Love, but left at the same time when he was selected 37th overall in the 2008 Draft by the Bucks. Mbah a Moute had played with the Bucks until recently, when he was traded to the Kings before the 2013-14 season and then flipped on to Minnesota after playing just nine games in Sacramento. He had spent the last season backing up Love, specializing on the defensive side. 

With all the hypothetical European players we’ve seen be drafted in our NBA coverage, it’s a little surprising that Minnesota was just allowed to sign Alexey Shved from CSKA Moscow without drafting him. A retrospective of Shved’s time with the Timberwolves describes it thusly: “There were flashes of playmaking ability and the occasional burst of bench scoring, but Shved apparently never really got comfortable in the good ol’ US of A, avoided learning English because it justified some legit social anxiety, and used his friendship with Andrei Kirilenko during his rookie year as a crutch that eventually led to a permanent disability.” Those words from Robert Silverman were written in March of 2015 and can be considered pretty close to sentiments in August of 2014. 

This brings us to the two most recent first overall picks, who we’ll cover in reverse order. Andrew Wiggins was the son of former NBA player Mitchell Wiggins and former Olympic sprinter Marita Payne-Wiggins, who raised their family in Vaughan, Ontario just a few blocks away from the park named after Marita. Wiggins dominated the Canadian high school ranks in his one season playing for Vaughan High School, with his team going 44-1 and only losing the one game because Wiggins cramped up and exited early. Clearly too dominant for Canadian competition, Wiggins transferred to Huntington Prep in West Virginia, a “high school” that is functionally just a basketball team, eventually reclassifying from the #1 recruit in the high school class of 2014 to the #1 recruit in the high school class of 2013. Wiggins received virtually every accolade that pronounced him as the best basketball player of his age group before enrolling for his one season at the University of Kansas, where he drew criticism for his occasional on-court passivity despite setting a school record for most points scored by a freshman. While there were other contenders for the #1 draft prospect, Wiggins was the consistent odds-on favorite to be selected first overall for years until the moment the Cavaliers made it happen.

In some ways, Anthony Bennett’s story mirrors that of Wiggins. Like Wiggins, Bennett was born in Toronto and then relocated to West Virginia to increase his basketball prospects. Their paths deviate from there; for one, Bennett’s high school closed shortly after he arrived and he relocated to Nevada to play at Findlay Prep. This school also sort-of closed in the middle of Bennett’s attendance, but the basketball team kept on humming until 2019 and won a national championship during Bennett’s time there. Bennett stayed local by attending UNLV, played pretty well, then declared after his freshman year as a “likely top-5” draft pick. After Cleveland won the lottery, seven leading mock drafts had Bennett slotted between the third and eighth picks in the draft. And all of this sounds more complimentary than it is, considering that the 2013 draft class was largely regarded as weak. As a result, the Cavaliers were “making all sorts of unrealistic proposals to trade the pick” on the eve of the draft, leading Sam Smith to be “the first to try” slotting Bennett to the Cavaliers in his June 27 mock draft simply due to a lack of compelling alternatives. One day later, Smith’s call was proven correct as Cleveland made a selection widely perceived as shocking. “I’m just surprised as anyone else,” Bennett said on his draft night.  

It’s hard to overstate how poorly Bennett’s rookie season went. By December, draft expert Chad Ford was saying that Bennett looked like “the worst [first overall pick] in the past 20 years.” By January, Bennett was starting to show signs of life, putting up 15 points and 8 rebounds in a loss to the Pelicans. That was the 33rd game of Bennett’s career and his first scoring double-digit points, which contrasted sharply to the history of first overall picks (two-thirds of whom score double digits in their first game and the prior slowest of whom did so in 11 games). He finished the year with 52 games played, averaging 4.2 points and 3.0 rebounds per game. Bennett was still technically a “recent first overall pick,” but he arrived at that station with diminished luster and did everything possible to erode his reputation further in his first season in the league. 

The Trade: On May 18, Adrian Wojnarowski reported that, for the first time, the Wolves would make Love available in a trade. This was a rare chance for NBA teams to acquire a complementary superstar, seemingly equipped to play as a first, second, or maybe even third banana, and there was immediately a long list of interested teams. The first swath of suggested suitors included the Celtics, Warriors, Lakers, Suns, and Bulls, with the Knicks, Rockets, and Cavs also being discussed before long and countless other teams being whispered as potential fits. The first frontrunner was the Warriors, with a somewhat infamous trade that would swap Love for future franchise icon Klay Thompson discussed in various forms, but Golden State ultimately balked at surrendering Thompson (good call). One day ahead of the draft, the Cavaliers were reported to be “fiercely determined” to acquire Love in exchange for their #1 overall pick, but had been stymied by his pointed refusal to sign an extension in Cleveland.

That math changed in both directions a couple weeks later. With Lebron as a teammate, Love was more content to stick around in Cleveland long-term. But with Andrew Wiggins already identified and associated with the team, trading “the #1 pick” was suddenly less appealing for the Cavaliers than it had been a few weeks earlier. Cleveland floated an offer that included Dion Waiters instead of Wiggins, which was shot down, and a stalemate emerged as conflicting sources reported that the Cavaliers and Warriors were or weren’t willing to include Wiggins and Thompson, respectively. 

Imagine trading a guy after you’ve made him pose like this.

As we now know, only one of those teams was ultimately willing to include their coveted player, but the inclusion of Wiggins re-complicated matters. After Wiggins signed his rookie contract, a 30-day moratorium went into effect that prevented him from being traded. By the end of July, this trade was so clearly agreed that the Wolves had stopped talking with other teams, but they hadn’t talked to Cleveland in two weeks, either, as the two sides waited for the clock to run down. In order to make sure things got over the finish line, Love requested a trade to the Cavaliers on July 26, which owner Glen Taylor responded to by acknowledging that Love would likely be traded shortly after August 23. Love and the Cavaliers spent the meantime discussing the possibilities through which he might sign an extension with the franchise.

Realistically, this is two trades, with the only common link being the Heat’s first-round pick. Kevin Love was traded from Minnesota to Cleveland for three first round picks, two of which were already drafted players and one of which was just a pick. Thaddeus Young was traded from Philadelphia to Minnesota for two players and that pick. However, this was very much a three-team deal in practice, because both trades hung in limbo as the 30-day window ran on Wiggins’ contract. Rumors that Young would go to Minnesota had been reported since July 28, but there ended up being last-minute uncertainty as to whether the three-team trade would come together as forecasted and which players would be involved. There was even last-minute intrigue when Phoenix threw up an August 22 buzzer beater attempt of an Eric Bledsoe for Kevin Love swap, but that offer was rejected within 20 minutes of its public floating. 

Contemporaneous trade grades acknowledged this as an obvious win for the Cavaliers, which were instantly resurrected from years of wallowing in sorrow and had become the team to beat in the Eastern Conference. Some were just as high on the return for the Timberwolves, especially given their unfavorable position of receiving a trade request from a disgruntled superstar. Everyone just short of shrugged their shoulders at Philadelphia, with no words left to say about trading a former starter away for worse players and draft picks. 

The Timberwolves announced that they would introduce their new players at the world-famous Minnesota State Fair, but were silent about whether they would be commissioning butter sculptures in their honor. 

The Results: The 2015 Miami draft pick was top-10 protected, and Miami retained the pick by selecting #10 overall in their first post-Lebron season. The pick conveyed in 2016, when Philadelphia selected Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot out of France. Despite his great name, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot never made much of an impact in Philadelphia and was traded away two seasons after he arrived. We will not discuss him further.

Let’s dispense with the other 76ers before discussing the substantive trade. Alexey Shved only played 17 games in Philadelphia before he was traded to the Rockets in December. Luc Mbah a Moute averaged a career high 28.6 minutes per game and 9.9 points per game as a consistent starter for an 18-64 team, developing a new skill as he went from 0.3 three-point attempts per game in 2013-14 to 3.0 per game in 2014-15. With 6 years of NBA experience, he had more tenure than everyone else on the team except Jason Richardson, who returned for a 19 game cameo in February after missing more than two calendar years with a knee injury. Mbah a Moute became a free agent after the season and chose to sign somewhere less depressing (the Los Angeles Clippers). 

We don’t need to overthink the winner of this trade; Kevin Love is the 9th-best player in Cavaliers franchise history and the team won its first and only championship two seasons after he arrived. Great trade for Cleveland. They might have won it one year after he arrived, but he missed most of the playoffs after dislocating his shoulder in the first round. Developments in each of the subsequent offseasons prevented Love from winning another championship in Cleveland (first Kevin Durant joined Golden State, then Kyrie Irving left, then Lebron left), but he still re-signed in Cleveland for four more years in the summer of 2018. Injuries began sapping away at his ability to star, and he transitioned to become a reserve player before the team bought him out in February of 2023. 

Things were generally less inspiring for the players Minnesota received in exchange. Bennett’s tenure was perhaps the most gruesome; the team exercised his third-year contract option ahead of his second season, which is all but a formality for early NBA draft selections. Bennett showed only marginal improvement in Minnesota and picked up an ankle injury that ended his season early. In an essentially unprecedented move for a first overall draft pick, the Wolves ended up waiving Bennett prior to the start of his third season in the league. Thaddeus Young spent even less time in Minnesota and was traded to Brooklyn after starting all 48 games he played with the Timberwolves. But this at least had a silver lining, as Young was traded in a straight-up swap that facilitated the homecoming of franchise legend Kevin Garnett. 

That left Minnesota with just Andrew Wiggins, who got off to a great start when he won Rookie of the Year. This didn’t lead to much team success; the Wolves won just 16 games and picked first overall in the next draft, where they drafted Karl-Anthony Towns and briefly rostered three consecutive first overall picks in Bennett, Wiggins, and Towns. Wiggins essentially proved his draft critiques correct, showing exceptional flashes of offensive ability coupled with inconsistent effort and decision making. When Wiggins became eligible for a max contract extension, Minnesota owner Glen Taylor conditioned the contract offer on a promise and handshake from Wiggins that he would work to improve as a player, which is the kind of thing that looks bad in hindsight when the player doesn’t actually improve. By the summer of 2018, there was no doubt that Minnesota had lost this trade. In February of 2020, Minnesota traded Wiggins to the Golden State Warriors and brought an era of Minnesota basketball to a merciful end. 

The Aftermath: Of course, Wiggins immediately began showing that long-awaited improvement in Golden State, leading the team in minutes his first year and arguably serving as the team’s second-most important player during a 2021-22 championship season, a season which also included his first All-Star appearance. Wiggins signed a long-term extension with Golden State in the wake of that championship, but has taken a step back since then, with old criticisms of his play once again becoming applicable. Among members of the 2014 NBA Draft class, Wiggins still has a healthy lead in minutes played, but nobody would take him in the top 5 of a redraft. 

It could be worse for a number one draft pick. After leaving Minnesota, Anthony Bennett had a Canadian homecoming when he signed with the Toronto Raptors. By December, Bennett made history as the first person to be selected number one overall and then play in the D-League. Despite being well-liked by teammates, coaches “grew increasingly frustrated with his inability to grasp what it really takes in the cut-throat world of the NBA,” and he was waived by the Raptors in March after playing just 84 minutes for his hometown team. Bennett’s final NBA experience came the next season with the Brooklyn Nets, with his final game coming in garbage time during a loss to the Pacers (Bennett made both shots he attempted). He spent the next few years in the G-League and snagged another million dollars from the Houston Rockets in 2019, but required knee surgery before the start of the season and was waived. After that, Bennett played in Puerto Rico, Israel, Taiwan, and maybe Korea, but that’s debatable. Bennett definitely did sign with the Goyang Sono Skygunners in August of 2023, but he left the team that same month before the Skygunners had registered him as a player. So he definitely didn’t “play” in Korea, but I wanted to make sure I could reference the Skygunners on three occasions in this post (though I’ll need to be sneaky if I want to use “Skygunners” a fourth time). 

Thaddeus Young hasn’t had the most exciting NBA career, but it’s still arguably ongoing. This is also the first of six trades in his career, so we’ll be hearing more from him. At time of writing, his last NBA game was in Game 1 of the first round series between the Phoenix Suns and Minnesota Timberwolves. Young was one of five players who the Suns brought in for the final 3:37 of a game that they were losing by 20 and would ultimately lose by 25. 

Alexey Shved’s time in Houston was even quicker than his time in Philadelphia, traded after nine games to play a final 16 NBA games with the New York Knicks. That 16 game stint was arguably the best of Shved’s time in America, but he was content to return to Russia and played for Khimki or CSKA Moscow through 2023. He spent the last season in China playing for the Shanxi Loongs (formerly known as the Shanxi Brave Dragons), averaging 16 points and 9.5 assists for the season. 

Luc Mbah a Moute signed with the Clippers expecting to take a bench role on a deeper team, but was moved into the starting lineup shortly after arrival. He ended up starting 137 of the 155 games he played as a Clipper before signing with the Rockets for the 2018-19 season. Despite two shoulder dislocations that disrupted his season, Mbah a Moute played a key role on a championship-worthy Rockets team and earned votes for Sixth Man of the Year. The next year, he returned to the Clippers but only played four games before a knee injury required surgery. That seemed to end his NBA career, but Mbah a Moute had a final opportunity when Thabo Sefolosha opted out of the NBA’s coronavirus bubble and Houston signed him as a replacement. Houston played 20 games in the bubble that year and Mbah a Moute played in three of them, the final being a 38 point loss to Philadelphia. He’s become an agent in his post-playing career, joining CAA in February of 2023. 

That leaves us with Kevin Love, whose post-Cleveland career didn’t begin until February of 2023 and has been pretty stable since. Love signed a contract with the Miami Heat after leaving Cleveland and proceeded to play just about as well as he had played for the Cavaliers that season. But Cleveland was paying him upwards of $30 million and Miami was paying him about $3 million, so the fan experience felt a lot better, particularly when the Heat made a shocking run to the NBA Finals as an 8-seed. Love was a good enough fit that the Heat re-signed him to a contract with a player option for 2024-25, which Love only declined so that he could sign a new contract this offseason that keeps him with the team through 2025-26.