Cleveland Cavaliers Star Kevin Love Talks Team's Big Turnaround in 2022 (Exclusive)
Kevin Love has been through his share of ups and downs with the Cleveland Cavaliers. After the team won the NBA Championship in 2016 and reached the NBA Finals the following year, the Cavaliers suffered three consecutive seasons where they won no more than 22 games. This year the Cavaliers have won over 40 games and will compete in at least the play-in tournament once the season ends. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Love talked about how the team was able to turn things around this year.
"When we added Ricky Rubio to the mix and we added Evan Mobley as well and we had the group that at, we had from last year, but healthy and hungry, we started looking at training camp and thought we have a pretty good team here," Love told PopCulture exclusively. "We have something that we could surprise a lot of people, we could make some noise and then kind of out of the gate, once we went on our first road trip we won some big games against Denver, against the Clippers. We flew across the country and we beat Charlotte on the road. We come back home after a long road trip and we win two, three games in a row, we kind of felt like we could get rolling. And we only won 22 games last year, we won 42 as of, so that's a plus 20 in the win column. And that's pretty substantial for us to be able to do that."
When the Cavaliers were playing for championships LeBron Jams was on the roster. He left after the 2017 season to join the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Cavaliers had to rebuild. Darius Garland has led the way for the Cavs by averaging 21.6 points and 8.6 assists per game. Jarrett Allen has been a solid big man, scoring 16.1 points and pulling down 10.8 rebounds per contest. Love has played a sixth-man role this year and is averaging 13.4 and seven rebounds per game.
If the playoffs were to start today, the Cavaliers would be the No. 7 seed and host the No. 8 Atlanta Hawks in a play-in game. And if they lose that game, they will have another shot to make the playoffs they will play the winner of the No. 9 vs. No. 10 seed.
"At the end of the day no matter the seed, whether we're in the playing game or whether we're in the top six seed, just making sure that we get everybody back whole and health," Love said. "We're such a better team when we have everyone, I would say the strength of our team is the team and the numbers that we have."