Kevin Love Scoring Tear Brings His Stats Up to The Level of the All-Time Greats

When you think of Kevin Love, you think of a big bruising gritty rebounder. But when a guy starts averaging 30+ a night and brings his scoring average up to almost 27 points games based in large part on outside shooting, you start seeing names that just astound you as comparables:

Bird
LeBron
Durant
Dirk

These are guys who have gone for over 26.6 a game with 7 rebounds and at least 3 three-point attempts per game. And Love....

So you have 4 guys who may be 4 of the top 25 players of all time, and Kevin Love. That tells you how good Love has been this year.

If you go with Love's scoring and rebound stats and try to find guys between 6'8" and 6'10" as comparables, you get Moses Malone, and Bob Petit, and, interestingly, Bob McAdoo.

The McAdoo comparison is a very, very interesting one to me. As someone who watched the Braves religiously growing up, McAdoo was our star. A guy who could score outside and inside, but made his money outside. A guy who was an undersized center. A guy whom everyone respected, but didn't think of as an all-time great, and a guy who was far better on the offensive end of the court (even though he had some HUGE rebounding numbers). McAdoo was the league MVP one year.

Perhaps due to the black-to-black and white-to-white comparison, one would not think of Bob McAdoo as a Kevin Love comparable, but thinking about it a little -- sure.

Love is obviously also very comparable to Bob Petit, but me being under 65, I have seen only grainy highlights of Petit.

HM