Written by Sean Deveney at SportingNews.com
The Kevin Love-fest started in Boston back in January 2012. Yes, more than four years ago.
Here on the brink of another trade deadline, the NBA’s rumor mill has again been sawing off solid chunks of Love-to-Boston chatter. This should be no surprise. Getting Love to the Celtics is a sort of obsession around the league, dating to the goofball days after the resolution of the NBA’s lockout.
At the time, rumors had already bubbled up that Boston was looking to move on from the Paul Pierce-Kevin Garnett pairing, while Love appeared headed into free agency, unable to reach an extension agreement on his rookie contract. That would make Love a restricted free agent, and led to the first whiff of speculation came that perhaps the Timberwolves’ budding star would sign a deal in the summer of 2012 with the Celtics.
Here we are in 2016, and the Celtics have changed coaches, Pierce and Garnett have gone on to play for four other franchises combined, Love was traded to Cleveland for two No. 1 overall draft picks, there’s been one presidential election and another on the way … Yet Love-to-Boston is still very much an obsession and still very much not a reality. It’s fair to wonder: Why? What is it about Love that makes Boston unable to quit him?
The facile answer is that he’s a big white guy, and Boston is a city with a deep history of racism, one that prefers its sporting stars to be white. That’s an utterly outdated, oversimplified stereotype, though, and never applied to the Celtics—the NBA’s first integrated team, its first team to have an all-black starting lineup and the first team to hire a black head coach (Bill Russell).
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