SACRAMENTO — Kevin Love had a simple explanation for why he posted a meme about the NBA’s latest scandal: It was funny.
“My whole thing last year was to bring comedy and relief to tough situations,” the 17-year NBA veteran said.
That’s what he did last season when his team dealt with the Jimmy Butler fiasco — and he did it again when news broke that the FBI had arrested Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups for gambling fraud.
Authorities allege Rozier tipped off bettors that he’d been exiting games early, signaling them to hit the under on his player props. Billups is accused of being part of an illegal poker-game scheme involving Mafia crime families.
With allegations that wild, the jokes came easy — and Love, as he often does, joined in. He shared a photoshopped image of Billups and Rozier together in the style of the cheating couple who went viral at a Coldplay concert this summer.
“I thought it was funny,” Love said.
One person, though, didn’t: Portland and former Weber State guard Damian Lillard.
Lillard commented on Love’s Instagram post, calling the joke “weak” — along with some words not fit to print. That prompted a phone call between the two, which ultimately led Love to delete the post.
“It was great,” Love said of the conversation. “Dame is somebody I’ve known for a long time and have a lot of respect for. I think his mindset was — and I agree — whether they’re right or wrong in this situation, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Innocent until proven guilty.
“But nowadays it’s kind of the other way. In the world of public opinion, you’ve already put somebody in a hole. Whether they’ve done something or not, it’s like, ‘OK, guilty until proven innocent.’ It’s almost flipped, so I get that. But he was saying, ‘Just consider the kids involved in this.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right.'”
Love said he took down the post out of respect for Billups and Rozier, both of whom he called “former teammates and brothers.”
Love played alongside Rozier in Miami last season and said Billups was a veteran who helped him early in his career.
“It’s almost unbelievable,” Love said of the allegations. “It was so unexpected and caught all of us — the NBA community and everybody — so off guard. You just wish the best for everyone. You never want to see that.”
And at least one future Hall of Famer didn’t want to see a joke about it, either.
“I think that one particular post was like, ‘Hey, man, this might be a little too far,'” Love said. “I love those guys. I thought it was funny — I still think it’s funny — but I do understand that not everybody else is going to be with that.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
