After Tuesday night's NBA draft lottery, the picks are in place and teams will now begin lining up to make their pitches to the Minnesota Timberwolves to try to land Kevin Love in a trade. They better be prepared to come strong.
While trades involving Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Dwight Howard in a two-year span have made stars changing teams seem commonplace, it's still rare for players as effective as Love was last season to move. In fact, if Love is traded, he'll be just the third player since the ABA-NBA merger to change teams after a season of 20-plus wins above replacement player (WARP), joining LeBron James in 2010 (25.4) and Moses Malone in 1982 (21.9) -- both of whom were free agents when they were traded.
So the case can be made that Love is the best player on the trade block in four decades.
Selling high
Among players traded before hitting free agency, Charles Barkley currently holds the modern record for the most WARP the season before being traded (from the Philadelphia 76ers to the Phoenix Suns in the summer of 1992). Here's how Love compares to the other leaders in this category:
Best WARP in the season before a trade
*Traded midseason. Drexler's stats are for season of trade.
Expanding our time frame by using Basketball-Reference.com's Win Shares, only one player in NBA history has rated as more valuable than Love (14.3 Win Shares) the season before a trade: Wilt Chamberlain. The Big Dipper actually qualified both times he changed teams, midway through the 1964-65 season when the Warriors sent him back to Philadelphia (15.1) and again in the summer of 1968 when the Sixers traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers (20.4).
Since stars rarely ask out after a successful season, most teams have had to sell low when trading one. Paul and Howard both had seasons with 20-plus WARP -- just not immediately before being traded. Paul was a year removed from arthroscopic knee surgery and paced himself in the 2010-11 season before exploding in the playoffs, while Howard's final season in Orlando (14.6 WARP) was cut short by back surgery, the reason he doesn't even appear on the list above.
Other players have still had plenty of value at the time of a trade. Barkley won MVP in his first season with the Suns, and Shaquille O'Neal bounced back from an injury-plagued final season with the Los Angeles Lakers (14.4 WARP) to finish second in the voting in 2004-05. Still, since both players were older at the time they were traded (Barkley was 29 years old and O'Neal already 32) and Love is just hitting his prime at age 25, he might be the most valuable player available for trade since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar requested one from the Milwaukee Bucks in the summer of 1974, some four decades ago.
Setting Love's value
Enough about the past. Let's look ahead. Based on Love's track record and the development of similar players at the same age, my SCHOENE projection system pegs him as one of the league's most valuable players over the next three seasons.
Some skepticism about those projections is understandable, given Love's defensive limitations (he's one of the league's worst rim protectors among big men) and the Timberwolves' inability to make the playoffs. However, plus-minus statistics show him as just as valuable as his impressive (and offense-biased) box score stats. Love ranked sixth in the wins above replacement stat calculated from ESPN's real plus-minus, and Minnesota was outscored by 6.1 points per 100 possessions with him on the bench per NBA.com/Stats, making them functionally equivalent to this season's Lakers.
Just how much Love is worth to his next team depends on his contract status. Even at the maximum salary, Love is underpaid on his current contract extension. Based on his WARP projection and the average cost in free agency of about $2 million per marginal win, he provides $34.0 million in value next season, when he'll make $15.7 million.
That difference is the minimum bar teams have to clear in their offers, since otherwise the Timberwolves would be better off simply keeping Love and daring him to leave money on the table to sign elsewhere as an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2015, when he can opt out of his contract. But Love might be significantly more valuable elsewhere based on a couple of different scenarios.
First, Love could agree to opt in to the relatively cheap final year of his extension (2015-16, when he'd make $16.7 million) as a condition of a trade, as Paul did when he was dealt to the Clippers. That would guarantee his new team at least $35.3 million in marginal value.
Second, any team that believes it can re-sign Love when he hits free agency will continue to benefit from his presence. Even when his salary escalates to the maximum 30 percent of the salary cap for players with seven-to-nine years of experience, he should still be a good value. If that happened in 2016-17, Love's estimated marginal value would be $12.0 million, based on the cap continuing to rise to around $70 million.
As Love's salary grows and his production declines, his marginal value will descend to zero. But even over the next three years, if he opted in and re-signed, his surplus value to a new team would be nearly $50 million. To put that in context, a Nate Silver analysis on FiveThirtyEight found that the typical No. 1 pick provides $30 million in surplus value over his first five seasons in the league.
Extending that to include second contracts, over the period from 1998 (the start of the current rookie scale contracts) through 2007, I find that on average teams get nearly $56 million in marginal value from their No. 1 picks, with most of that coming from the top three No. 1 picks in that span (Elton Brand, Dwight Howard and James). No other No. 1 picks between 1998 and 2007 were worth more than Love's estimated surplus value.
So, while this year's draft crop is considered better than average, it wouldn't be outlandish for Minnesota to demand the No. 1 pick from the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for Love, or an equivalent package from another team. After all, the Timberwolves have one of the most valuable trade assets in NBA history to offer.