Minnesota Sports Forum

lipoli390 wrote:Alex -- thanks for the reality check. Fact is, there is nothing new in a team's best player calling out his teammates. We can debate whether Love is as worthy as the likes of Kobe and Bird, but I see nothing wrong with a player of Love's caliber ( our only allstar caliber player) calling out players for pouting and not joining in timeout team huddles in a big close game like last night's. He's understandably frustrated by the fact that this organization has failed to assemble an adequate supporting cast around him. At the end of the day, this team's horrible record in close games is on our front office. Thanks to McHale we have Love and Pek. But Kahn and Flip have failed to adequately build around those two pieces.

Lip and alex, you guys are completely missing my point in initiating this thread. I think I have made it very clear several times that I have no problem with a player getting in another player's face...that's leadership, and it's what this team sorely needs. And I have no problem with a star saying the team needs to play better.

But the five examples you provided are completely different from Kevin's approach of singling out specific players, and doing it in a coward's fashion rather than face to face. I think if you read these five examples, you will easily see how different they are from the Love approach.

Take LeBron, for example. In the heat of action, he confronted Chalmers directly. LeBron is the leader of the team, and fans expect leaders to do what he did face to face. But then take a look at his comments to the media. Rather than blasting his teammate to some media jackal Love-style, instead he is supportive of him. He says he was wrong, and that he apologized to Chalmers personally. And he said "I ride with him every day". I know you guys can see the difference between Love and James, and this example is a perfect example of how a leader acts.

The Larry Bird article is another great example of leadership...thanks for providing it and please send a copy to Love. Whereas Kevin is most comfortable citing specific guys deficiencies to the media, Bird calls out the entire team...which includes him. It's all about pronouns. Larry understands that "we" is the correct pronoun for a leader to use...Kevin gravitates toward "he" or "they".

Same with Kobe. Again, he doesn't call out a specific individual, he just says the entire team needs to be better. Again...leadership.

And no problem with Jordan decking Steve Kerr. In fact, I called for Pek to throttle Love earlier in this thread. Emotions run hot in games and practices, and shit like this happens. Again, very different than whining about a player to the media.

Even Dwight Howard doesn't come across as immature as Kevin, in that he doesn't single anyone out. I don't like his comments though, because it sounds a little like Dwight is saying nobody but him is working hard. Not appropriate. But do we want Dwight Howard to be a leadership role model for our star. I'd prefer that he act more like LeBron and Bird.

I hope Kevin is reading this...he can learn a lot from these leadership examples :) .

The problem is that leadership is one of skills which is very hard to impossible to learn, you can find that ability as you mature but it is not granted by any mean, you are either born as a leader or you are not. In all sports there are guys who are getting paid big bucks because they are leaders even though their talent maybe isnt that high.

I don't think that Love is leader and i don't think that he will ever be. I expected Rubio to be our leader, but he has too many problems with his overall level of play that he cannot serve as a leader right now. We are totally un-clutch with no leader, no wonder that we are losing close games one by one.

I honestly don't give a shit how the message gets sent to the guys as long as it gets sent. If Love uses the media to do so, oh well. It's not the perfect method, but I don't believe there's only one correct way of being a leader. We'll see how the team responds to this in the next however many games. Wins make everything better, and that's what I'm hoping is the result. Denver just beat OKC last night and are now another team ahead of us. Our guys need to get their shit together.

Long - I see and respect your point. And I actually agree with m4gor that Love doesn't appear to be a natural leader. But I end up with Cam on this. I don't care much about how the message gets sent and the real test and cure for this team will be winning.

Does everyone remember when Berea a few years ago during those really hard to watch years with Rambis when he went off on the bench for pretty much the same reasons why Love went off on the bench the other night. Just thought it was interesting this time it was Berea being called out when he called the bench out a few years ago. I didn't read all the thread posts so I appologize if someone already pointed this out.

lipoli390 wrote:Long - I see and respect your point. And I actually agree with m4gor that Love doesn't appear to be a natural leader. But I end up with Cam on this. I don't care much about how the message gets sent and the real test and cure for this team will be winning.

Yeah, winning is often the ultimate cure, Lip. The problem is I just don't see this team winning consistently if Love continues to act in such a selfish way. Abe's points are valid, that we don't know exactly what is going on in the locker room, but I certainly have my guesses. I see a very unhappy clubhouse, with little offcourt interaction between our star and the rest of the team. I hope I'm wrong. You can thrive in individual sports, like baseball, if you have a team that doesn't get along. But basketball is a team sport dependent on player interaction and making your teammate better, and I believe Love's immaturity is an impediment to our success.

Again I hope I'm wrong. I see this team as more talented than most on this forum, and we are talented enough to win games like Charlotte tonight. But the 0-10 blues will continue until we find a real team leader that brings his teammates games up, rather than down.

"JJ Barea took it in stride. Says he would've preferred love not to go at him publicly but he agrees that he can't sulk like that"

"Barea said he and Love have talked and moved past Wednesday's back and forth. Dante Cunningham declined comment, said he'll talk pregame"

Seems like Love's message got through. No harm done. Now let's just win some damn games.

Barea: "If we want to win, we gotta play as a team, we gotta stay together so we're done with that."

Berea's words are all correct, but I can feel the seething hate for Love lying underneath. This team is seriously broken.

JJ is history and I'm mixed about it. He won a few games for us and I always admired his intensity, but his play was so erratic at times. We're not going to get much for him, maybe a second round pick, but getting rid of him will appease Prince Kevin. And it's clear to me that Flip and Rick are afraid of Love. They're stuck because he is far and away our best player.

If they don't get rid of JJ, this kind of shit will continue to bubble up, and we can't afford that.

longstrangetrip wrote:Berea's words are all correct, but I can feel the seething hate for Love lying underneath. This team is seriously broken.

JJ is history and I'm mixed about it. He won a few games for us and I always admired his intensity, but his play was so erratic at times. We're not going to get much for him, maybe a second round pick, but getting rid of him will appease Prince Kevin. And it's clear to me that Flip and Rick are afraid of Love. They're stuck because he is far and away our best player.

If they don't get rid of JJ, this kind of shit will continue to bubble up, and we can't afford that.

Think you're a little bit too critical of Love during these types of situations and I say that with as much respect as I can. Grant Hill the other day talked about how he thought Love did the right thing even though it's a tough thing to do. Obviously what Love was doing previously wasn't working, so a shake-up here and there to wake the team up can't be too bad.

I also think a bigger reason to trade JJ is because he honestly hasn't played that well this year and we need a second unit floor general, which he is not. This clash between him and Love isn't the major reason why we deal him if we go that route. Barea's overpaid, selfish and one-dimensional. When that one dimension (scoring) isn't working for him, I believe he's a huge liability. When he's played poorly this year, more times than not, we've lost.