@JayHawkFanToo
There’s a nice article over at Wages of Wins that does a pretty detailed analysis of Garnett vs. Love over the early part of their career. It basically determines that Love has been more productive with worse teammates than Garnett had in his early years.
As a second year player, Garnett was teamed with Tom Gugliotta (a solid veteran) and Stephon Marbury. He also had Sam Mitchell and Terry Porter (productive veterans) on those early teams. When Marbury was traded a few years later, they brought back Terrell Brandon, who played an all star caliber PG for a few years for them. Malik Sealy and Wally Szczerbiak (another all star caliber player for a couple years) teamed with him as well. This all before he was 25.
The best teammate Love ever had was Al Jefferson, and the two of them never played a full season together because of injuries. Kevin Love has not played with a single other all star caliber teammate.
The situations were not even close to similar. You can’t compare Rubio to Marbury or Brandon because Rubio is the worst shooting PG in basketball, not just for last season, but on a historical basis. There’s no Gugliotta equivalent. No veterans like Sealy, Porter or Sam Mitchell. No draft picks that became like Szczerbiak. Just two lost seasons with Al Jefferson or Kevin Love injured for portions of them. That’s it.
@DoubleDD
I disagree with your guess that the “money teams” will always play for titles. This isn’t baseball. There’s a salary cap in the NBA that actually evens the playing field, provided that teams are smart with how they spend their money. Take Minnesota for example. They have had Kevin Love this entire time, and yet they have used lottery picks on the following players since drafting Love:
Ricky Rubio (worst shooting PG in NBA history)
Johnny Flynn (Out of the NBA)
Wesley Johnson (yet to average even double figures in his career)
Derrick Williams (had one season averaging 12 ppg, other than that, has averaged less than 9).
Trey Burke (traded for Shabazz Muhammed, who averaged 4 points a game in 37 games last year).
That’s the lottery picks they used. They had Ty Lawson, but traded him to Denver on draft day so they could keep Rubio and Flynn. I don’t have to tell you how that worked out.
Simply put, Minnesota’s front office did a terrible job surrounding Love with talent, in much the same way that Cleveland’s previous front office did a poor job of surrounding Lebron with talent. I think now players in the NBA realize that if they are stuck on a team with a bad front office, they are better off either 1) taking it upon themselves to bring in good players or 2) moving on.
Whether Minnesota has learned anything will become more obvious over the next couple of years as they try to build around Wiggins and Bennett. They got a good haul in this trade. Not enough to win a title, but a good start. But are they smart enough to build on the foundation or not?
As for me, I’m a Pistons fan from the Bad Boys days, so I know how the whole trade thing works. Those Pistons were built through the draft and trades
Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Dennis Rodman and John Salley were drafted by the Pistons.
Bill Laimbeer (Cleveland), Rick Mahorn (Washington), Vinnie Johnson (Seattle), James Edwards (Phoenix) and Mark Aguirre (Dallas) were all acquired via trade.
Why did the Pistons have to make so many trades? Well, by Isiah Thomas’ third year, they were a playoff team, but nowhere close to being good enough to take down the Celtics, but not picking high enough to get impact players entering the league like Malone, Jordan, Olajuwon, Barkley and Ewing. So they traded for guys to fill out their roster and hung two banners - my two favorite teams of all time.
