SALT LAKE CITY — If, on any random Monday morning throughout this college hoops season, you happened to be walking through the Arizona basketball office, you would eventually come upon something that so many fans and talking heads and social media lurkers would be surprised to see.
Caleb Love in his real element. Sitting in front of a big screen. Film flashing, his eyes moving. Every shot, every pick-and-roll read, every decision made, every decision not made. Love breaks it all down to an audience of one — Arizona director of player development Rem Bakamus. Love narrates, assesses, winces at mistakes. He speaks, Bakamus listens.
“His own harshest critic,” Bakamus recently explained. “No matter what everybody says, this and that, he’s always his own harshest critic. That’s what people don’t understand.”
What everyone says about Love has long been a universal subject. In a college basketball landscape that more and more seemingly lacks major stars with household names, Love is one of the few collegians out there to elicit visceral reactions. Good and bad, for a few years now. Everyone who watches Caleb Love play has an opinion about how Caleb Love plays.
And now, perhaps, comes the ultimate theatre.
Of all the delicious scenarios that could emerge this March, no plotline rivals the potential script of Love facing his former team, the North Carolina Tar Heels, in an Elite Eight matchup in Los Angeles. A few orders of business will need to come first in the Sweet 16 — Arizona handling Clemson, North Carolina handling Alabama — but such a screenplay is too tempting to not at least imagine. It was only two years ago when, from the nether regions of the bracket, Love served as the flamethrower in eighth-seeded Carolina’s string of wins over Marquette, Baylor, UCLA, Saint Peter’s and rival Duke to reach the national championship game. Love was both incredible and erratic, unleashing his brand of wild shot-making and heedless decision-making.
For as perfect as the run was, what followed was every bit as dramatic, for all the wrong reasons. A 5-of-24, four-turnover performance in a national title game loss to Kansas that was so colossally bad that no two eyes could ever unsee it. As was Carolina’s entire following season, when one of college basketball’s proudest programs became the first preseason No. 1 team to miss the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded in 1985. Love was, both understandably, and at the same time overly harshly, the primary scapegoat in the complicated story of that team’s vanishing act. It was both in his best interest and the program’s best interest for him to enter the transfer portal last spring.
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Caleb Love has been just what Arizona needed. Can he lead them to a Final Four?
