It's a funny thing, but I think a bunch of what Love says is very open to interpretation. He's a 21 year old basketball player in a relatively high pressure media environment and is being interviewed frequently. How is it a high pressure environment, you ask? He has strong feelings about losing a lot, about having his minutes limited, about how good it feels to be welcomed to an elite squad with an optimistic attitude, and putting that all together makes for a situation where the truth is very difficult for him to represent and still be a good PR guy for his team, which is of course what he is very much expected to be. And all of this, like I said, at 21!
I think, if you read what he's saying, he's trying to be diplomatic. He wants to be honest and be himself (hard not to think that's OK when David Kahn is your boss, natch). He knows that it's a difficult needle to thread, but he tries. And he's not negative. He says it will be good to bring some of this family feeling back to Minnesota. If he was better at this kind of thing, that would be the takeaway. But he's kind of clumsy, and says a lot of other stuff, and that gets lost.
So he's unhappy about losing and not being allowed to contribute as much as he can. Good, I like it that way.
Mostly, I think his comments serve as a kind of Rorshach test. If you want to think he's a whiny primadonna, he leaves it open for you to do so. If you want to see him as an earnest young ballplayer, you can see that too. This kind of open, passive language is characteristic of uncomfortable young people who are trying to please different audiences at the same time or navigate difficult truths. Sounds about right to me.
The other thing that I have thought about this situation is that the whole focus of TeamUSA has been to get these guys comfortable and get them to gel. They're being worked, psychologically, by some of the best coaches in the game. They're being made to feel as good as they can. Think much of that happened last year at the Target Center? I don't. Last year everybody knew that most of those guys would be gone. You kind of don't want people to be too happy because whoever they get along with is more than likely to be leaving. I bet this year's a little different, though. Now that they have more guys they want to have around, I bet there's a lot more emphasis on helping them develop as a unit.
Unstopable evil.
