Isaiah Thomas has only been a member of the Cavaliers for about six months now. Due to a lingering hip injury, he’s also only been playing for the Cavaliers for a few weeks. But according to a New York Daily News report, that didn’t stop him from calling Kevin Love out during a Cleveland team meeting earlier this week.
On Monday night, an ESPN.com report surfaced indicating several Cavaliers players had targeted Love for exiting Cleveland’s embarrassing loss to the Thunder on Saturday afternoon with an illness. Love responded to the report by essentially confirming it on Tuesday afternoon. He admitted he was one of the main targets during the meeting.
But the Daily News took things a step further by reporting Thomas "led the charge" against Love. It seems to suggest Thomas was causing some level of conflict in the Cavaliers’ locker room even though he literally just got there.
This didn’t sit well with many NBA fans who responded to the report about Thomas calling Love out by accusing him of being everything from a bad teammate to a locker room snitch. They used a screengrab of Thomas from a recent Book of Isaiah video on The Players’ Tribune to show their disgust with Thomas’ alleged actions and turned him into a meme.
The funny part about this is that, if Thomas did, in fact, criticize Love during the Cavaliers’ team meeting, Love may not have been all that bent out of shape about it. Because for those who might not know, Thomas and Love have actually been friends for quite some time now. They once played on the same AAU team, and in an interview with The Verticalin 2016, Thomas spoke about his friendship with Love and about how he used to routinely stay at Love’s house when they were younger so they could play basketball together.
"Kevin and his dad Stan, they would come pick me up and I would stay the weekend at his house so I could play on that AAU team," Thomas said. "It’s something that me and Kevin, we’ll talk about. It’s crazy that we’re both in the NBA and he is at the level he’s at, and I’m doing pretty well. To be able to say that I used to go to his house every other weekend and stay the night and his parents used to cook dinner and all that type of thing, it’s crazy to see that."
When you take all that into consideration, Thomas going after Love in the Cavaliers’ locker room seems a whole lot less egregious. It won’t stop some NBA fans from continuing to turn Thomas into a meme, but in the grand scheme of things, Cavaliers fans would probably prefer to hear that Thomas went after Love as opposed to one of the other Cleveland players doing it.
