knicks1248 wrote:That's what they get for leaving Randle off the roster.
It's unfortunate that when the discussion comes up about players left off of Team USA, the conversation will eventually revert back to Kevin Love.
Love is going for many reasons, that don't have much to do with basketball on the court.
1) Team USA doesn't have many returning Olympic veterans and many turned them down because of the pandemic. There is always a desire to have a few experienced veterans with Olympic hardware as clout to be on the team
2) Jalen Rose is right, the team needs a high profile "American white guy"
3) Love came forward in public with his mental health issues. While many will support him in public, in private, this pissed off a lot of people because now he's essentially holding several elements around the league hostage. For example, Love's representation, ESM, can't drop him. Likely never, even if one day they want to do it. Love came forward with his mental health while there were discussions of an extension. The Cavs were basically backed into a corner. Love basically can't be openly criticized nor held accountable by any entity that profits directly from the NBA. In today's "woke" world, keeping Love off the team would only invite direct attack by the non sports mainstream media.
4) Love is a Nike athlete. They want a return on their investment and endorsing Love has been a consistent money loser for them. Actually anyone who endorsed Love across his career had to eat losses.
Lots of people in professional sports ( but also in many other niches and industries) see social justice as just another method of angling socially acceptable extortion into the sport. Do you have a racial diversity officer on your payroll and staff? Then your franchise must be a bunch of racists. We are going to attack you in the press and lobby against you with all your corporate and local sponsors unless you hire 4 of our own handpicked people in key positions in your organization and give us X amount of money each year to support our cause.
Team USA would have a hard time sending Kevin Love packing, and as a former medal winner, he had every right to lobby to be on this year's team, without looking like an attack on everyone with mental health struggles. Given the pandemic and lockdowns, where people in isolation are struggling emotionally/mentally/physically, this doesn't help the NBA's bottom line of keeping existing fans and making new fans. In fact, the NBA has been hemorrhaging fans for a while now. The cooked media numbers are up in some areas, but the league has lost "generational" level fans ( i.e. if the Dad stops watching, his sons stop watching and then they have no pathway to watch when they grow up with their own kids)
Randle also hasn't shown elite status for an extended period of time. So this isn't just about Love and his situation.
But since Love is white and most other players are black, that was going to get thrown into this too at some point. Everything in the current sports media is about woke and racial politics. It's infused in everything, esp ESPN which has seen it's ratings tank badly and are trying to double down on the fake feud bull**** to kick up the drama and attract ratings.
Kevin Love has always been an overrated basketball player. He's a compiler that doesn't really do much to help you win actual basketball games. He's always been a selfish player as well. But while he's not beloved as a team mates, he's popular as a person around the league. But being a mediocre basketball player is not his big sin. His big sin is he's not a minority gay woman in a wheelchair with three orphan kids who is an activist podcaster with a huge social media platform and is constantly drowning in woke.
If someone said to me, Julius Randle could do more on the court to help Team USA win actual basketball games than Kevin Love - I'd say that's absolutely true
If someone said to me, there are a couple of dozen players in the NBA, who might be seen as Olympic prospects, who could do more than Julius Randle ( and 20 times more than Love ) to help Team USA win basketball games - I'd say that's absolutely true too.
This is not fair for Julius Randle. But if you think about it, it's also not fair to Kevin Love either.
Some of you, not all, but some have a huge hard on for social justice. Well, it helped **** up the entire NBA as a sport. So when you see ****ty basketball because of it, that's what you said you wanted, and this is the unintended consequence of it all ( Once you let one thing that has **** to do with winning actual basketball games snowball, well all you end up with is bull**** that robs the game of any actual joy or wonder or beauty) . So enjoy your ****ty basketball. You always keep what you kill in this life.
7/14/2021 4:53 AM