Aimee
The conversation around now-Cleveland-Cavaliers star Kevin Love tends to steer one of two ways when we talk about him in the broader sense. First, he’s a great player, a tremendous rebounder, an unbelievable outlet-passer, a gifted scorer, and an all-around tremendous talent.
The second is that despite all that, he cannot be that good. After all, he never made the playoffs with the Timberwolves.
Not once.
Not a single year has Love made the playoffs. And because this statement covers several seasons, and in doing so spans a wide range of factors and elements, the idea is that there is no way to get around it. The paradigm suggests that it’s OK to reduce all of the elements that go into this concluding statement, based on the simple result.
How great can a player be if his team never made the playoffs? This naturally has implications for the Cavs as they traded for the 25-year-old Saturday. He never made the playoffs, can he really be that good?
This creates a fantastic little circular logic chain that chews up major radio time and fills column inches like a volcano of hot takes spewing molten reductive arguments down the hillside and covering the village of Nuance in ash.
