No need for Love to prove his intensity

Timberwolves rookie Kevin Love sat slumped at his new corner-locker stall last week after what he called the worst game he can remember playing. With both knees wrapped in ice bags, he looked so forlorn, you almost wanted to give the sweaty guy a big hug.

"Either that," Love said later, "or you should have slapped me."

Cameras televising the first preseason broadcast in the franchise's 20-year history captured a priceless moment when Love, in the midst of a 1-for-10 shooting night, came to the bench, buried his head in a towel in utter frustration and looked like he was -- against Chicago, in October! -- on the verge of an emotional meltdown.

Teammate Rashad McCants, seated next to him, watched Love with a look on his face that said: Dude, lighten up, we play 82 of these in the regular season.

"You know what: That's what makes him different," Wolves coach Randy Wittman said of Love. "He does care that much. As long as you don't bury yourself in it, that's a good thing. You want guys to care about their performance and the team's performance."

The best player on his team all his life until now, Love is the NBA newcomer who must prove he is tall enough, athletic enough, talented enough and fit enough to warrant the Wolves' big draft-night trade that brought his draft rights from the Memphis Grizzlies in an eight-player deal.

"People, wherever they are, they like to doubt me because they say, 'He's a slow, white guy, he can't get off the ground,'" Love said. "No matter what, I'm going to get it done. I'll show people that, too."

He has done it all his life, ever since his father, former NBA player Stan, placed a ball in his stroller and later plopped his growing boy in front of old game tapes featuring Moses Malone and Kevin McHale. When Kevin Love was in the ninth grade, he so impressed at an AAU summer camp that a coach from Mississippi went and told his star player, a high school senior, that there was this kid from Oregon who was a "white Al Jefferson." In his only collegiate season, he was named Pacific-10 Conference Freshman of the Year and Player of the Year, was a first-team All-America and led UCLA to its third consecutive Final Four appearance.

Now Love gathers his teammates' smelly sneakers after practice and totes them away in a mesh bag. Now he hangs his head after fouling out in 11 minutes one game, going 1-for-10 from the field the next. And this morning, he will wear an apron and hand out coffee at a downtown Minneapolis Starbucks in a promotion for Wednesday's season opener.

For the first time in his basketball life, he is a guy, not the guy.

"I've never really had an ego," he said. "Some guys can't accept it. Even in college, I only had a few plays ran for me. I got a lot of my 18 points a game off the offensive glass. Same thing here: Al Jefferson is probably our star player right now, and we have to get him the ball and I have to play off him to make this team work."

Confident

The first time he met Jefferson in September, Love told the Wolves' franchise player, "You're going to love playing with me."

"One more thing he said: 'We might have to share some rebounds,' " Jefferson said. "That's confidence. I like that."

Love in preseason play showed flashes of the shooting and passing skills that made him -- despite scouts' concerns about his foot speed and leaping ability -- the fifth player taken in the June draft. He concluded the eight-game schedule with a double-double game that soothed his pain after the aforementioned consecutive poor outings.

"I've never worried about him," Wittman said. "This guy believes he's going to be good."

That belief comes from his basketball bloodlines. His father taught him competitiveness -- and gave him more than one bloody nose -- during back-yard 1-on-1 games and groomed him for the NBA both by giving him the middle name Wesley (after Stan Love's pro teammate Wes Unseld) and by introducing him to old-school players such as Connie Hawkins, whose uniform number 42 Love now wears.

The same guy who busted the controller after he lost to his brother in video games now buries his head after a subpar performance in a preseason game. "I'm not trying to be a bad sport, it's just how competitive I am," he said. "I hate losing, and I hate playing bad."

Love lost 15 pounds to impress NBA scouts before the draft by changing his eating habits and working out constantly. When he was invited to practice with the U.S. Olympic team in Las Vegas in July, he noticed the chiseled physiques of Carlos Boozer and Dwight Howard. Love put most of those 15 pounds back on during a summer spent traveling and making promotional appearances, and he admits he wishes he would have reported to training camp in better shape.

A chef he has hired to cook healthy meals for him at his downtown condo started work on Friday.

"It was my first camp and I didn't know what to expect," Love said. "Next season, I'll be a lot more prepared. I know what I need to work on: I want to get leaner. I feel like I have the refined skills that a lot of those guys on the Olympic team have, but their bodies were unbelievable. You could see the three and four summers of work they've put in on their bodies. You could see what they did to change their bodies for their games.

"I've still got some baby fat. I'm only 20."

Learning a new game

He turned 20 last month, a fact that made McCants do a double-take.

"He's what, 21, 22?" McCants said. "He's just 20? Oh, wow, man, he's going to be amazing. People think of him as being undersized and just one of those white boys who go in there and bang. But he's a very skilled, very crafty player, and that's rare. ... He's going to shock the league."

McCants acknowledges it'll take Love time to grow comfortable with the pro game, a process Love said is just starting now that the preseason has just ended. McCants said it's a lesson he has tried to teach Love, particularly after Love's reaction on the bench during that preseason game.

"He was so caught up in the expectation of what he's supposed to do his first year," McCants said. "The NBA puts so much expectation on young guys so fast that they overwhelm themselves when they can't match what they're expected to do. So that's when he's over there, getting mad about nothing. It's the preseason, first of all. It's his first home game.

"You've got to humble yourself and just understand it's not going to go perfectly every time. You're going to have some of the worst games, some of the worst times, some of the lowest moments. But at the same time, you've got another day for it to be your highest. That's the thing he has to realize: You're not going to be 10-for-10 every game, you're not going to always get a rebound. But tomorrow, you'll be able to."

McCants isn't the only veteran teammate who offered the same advice. "Brian Cardinal told me not to worry about it, that I'll play a lot worse games than that, which was comforting," Love said. "I've always been like that. If I don't meet my expectations or exceed them, I'm never satisfied. That's what makes me who I am. That's me."