At long last, some good news for the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Though Kevin Love is still expected to miss extensive time, the team announced he won’t need surgery to recover from the non-displaced fracture in his left hand that he suffered in Tuesday’s loss to the Detroit Pistons. Here are the deets:
Kevin Love continued the examination and consultation process related to the non-displaced fracture of his left hand fifth metacarpal in New York City yesterday at the Hospital for Special Surgery. The examination and consultation process, including the Cavaliers medical team, Head Team Physician Dr. James Rosneck and Dr. Steven Maschke of Cleveland Clinic Sports Health and Dr. Michelle Carlson of the Hospital for Special Surgery, is now complete. Love will undergo a non-surgical treatment and rehabilitation process to repair the injury and is currently projected to be out for approximately eight weeks. His status will be updated as appropriate.
Initial timetables have Love missing anywhere between six to eight weeks, putting him back in the Cavaliers’ rotation around mid-to-late March—just weeks before the playoffs tip off.
This, obviously, isn’t ideal. The Cavaliers are barely holding on to the Eastern Conference’s No. 3 seed. Losing their second-best player only, in theory, makes their path out of the current malaise a crap ton more difficult.
At the same time, though, Love’s absence will force Tyronn Lue to futz and fiddle and fudge with the rotation. He’s verged on stubborn in that department. Inserting Isaiah Thomas into the starting lineup for Jose Calderon and benching Jae Crowder in favor of Tristan Thompson hardly qualifies as adequate experimentation. The Cavaliers, who remain in contention for the league’s worst defensive rating, should be using this stretch to deploy some of their more untested, yet hypothetically versatile combinations.
After all, if their plan is to still contend with the Warriors, they’ll need to have a couple high-quality defensive arrangements at their disposal. And playing Kevin Love at the 5, let alone at the 4, hasn’t helped them unlock any. This time without him needs to be spent looking for them.
