Report: Cavaliers flirted with trading Kevin Love to Phoenix

On the day the Cleveland Cavaliers fired their head coach, it appears some various forms of dirty laundry about the behind-the-scenes operations in Cleveland are coming to light. One such story being told suggested Kevin Love was close to being traded from Cleveland to Phoenix last season. This development was courtesy of Ethan Skolnick of The Miami Herald during a radio interview in Cleveland on Thursday.

On the surface of it all, this is hardly much of a shocking development out of Cleveland, and certainly not as surprising as a first-place team firing its head coach midway through the season, a year after playing in the NBA Finals. Heck, the idea of trading Love is the reason many of the Cavs players thought a team meeting was called Friday.

Love was staring directly at free agency at the end of last season and it would have made sense the Cavaliers would have thought about the possibility of moving Love in exchange for some sort of return on the chance they ended up losing him via free agency. Love leaving Cleveland felt like a realistic possibility as he could have moved on to another franchise and been more of a go-to guy rather than a complementary player alongside LeBron James. 

Throw in the idea that the combination of Love and James in Cleveland was either going to be a home-run combo or one that would never quite mesh well enough, and it was easy to see why Cleveland would have at least floated the idea in the meeting rooms. After all, any good GM is always thinking about every possible move that could at one point be on the table.

One of the possible reasons the trade involving Love never came to fruition is because there was no guarantee Love would choose to resign with the Suns. Love signed a multi-year deal with the Cavs last July, locking him into a spot in Cleveland through 2020 for a contract worth $113 million. That may have also been outside the price range Phoenix would have preferred to work with, too. The Suns are currently over the salary cap, although the Cavaliers are even more limited. Cleveland, however, is built more to win now with LeBron in town, while Phoenix looks to rebuild its franchise. One key signing could help speed that process along, but that would have been a significant gamble for Phoenix with Love.

So it has been quite an interesting couple of days for the Cleveland Cavaliers, to say the least. Is everything okie-dokie now with one coach fired, LeBron’s supposed preferred replacement in place? Can the Cavs now turn the page and rally together and finish what they have started this season, and were unable to finish last season?

[Fear the Sword]

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