Kevin Love is seeing a lot of similarities to his own career with an iconic team from his time when he is watching “The Last Dance” documentary about Micahel Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. Love has been tweeting about his observations, including a not-so innocuous question about when are we going to see more about Toni Kukoc? Even if Love himself won’t say it, he probably sees a lot of similarities in his role with the Cavaliers of the last decade and Kukoc’s role in the Bulls dynasty. But while he wouldn’t touch those specific parallels, Love did admit in an interview with The Athletic’s Jason Lloyd, that he wishes that Cavaliers could have had one more shot together.
“To even have just one more run at it, to see what we were capable of. Just one more run. I would’ve really loved to see that,” Love said. “I think we would’ve been primed for another really big run. Even if it was, for both of them, their last year in Cleveland. It would’ve been nice to see what we were capable of.”
There are a lot of similarities at the end of the Cavaliers run, but there remains a major difference: that it was a rumor for almost two years that LeBron James was looking towards the west coast and Los Angeles for the next stage of his career and family life. While Kyrie Irving requested a trade in the summer of 2017 like Scottie Pippen did early in the 1997-98 season, but there are still several reports that suggest Irving was offered in trades prior to his request and he only pushed for one once he found out. Also, there is the other unknown about how much Irving was able to discern about LeBron’s intentions for his future.
But while Love is understandably yearning for those good ol’ days of playing at the game’s highest level and he did stay behind, it’s not as if he was left behind in Ohio without reward. The 2019-20 season was the first of a 4-year, $120 million contract extension that Love signed in 2018 after LeBron signed with the Lakers in free agency earlier that summer.
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