Kevin Love
Career Accomplishments:
- 5-time All-Star
- 2-time All-NBA (both 2nd Team)
- 2016 NBA Champion
- 2012 Olympic Gold Medalist
How He Stacks Up:
If you take a look at the Basketball Hall of Fame and examine who’s in and who’s out (as I have done to an embarrassing extent), you’ll note that five All-Star selections tend to be kind of a tipping point toward Hall of Fame induction. Of the 26 Hall of Fame-eligible players with exactly five NBA All-Star selections, 17 of them are in the Hall of Fame.
This translates to a roughly 65.4 percent rate of induction. For comparison, of the 36 Hall of Fame-eligible players with exactly 4 NBA All-Star selections, only 16 (44.4%) are in the Hall of Fame, and among those 16, five had at least one ABA All-Star selection as well, essentially giving them five or more total All-Star selections when combining NBA and ABA.
Now, of the nine HoF-eligible players with five All-Star nods that are NOT in the Hall, only one of them has won a championship: Chauncey Billups. Unsurprisingly, he’s also the most recently retired member of this list and arguably the most likely to be inducted in the coming years.
Conversely, of the 17 HoF-eligible players with five All-Star nods that are in the Hall of Fame, 12 have won at least one NBA Championship. In other words, 12 of 13 (92.3%) possible Hall of Famers who have exactly five All-Star appearances and at least one NBA Championship is indeed in the Hall of Fame.
Does this mean that Kevin Love has a 92.3 percent chance of making the Hall of Fame? Eh, probably not. He was only the third-best player on that championship team, and he has only one ring, compared to the multiple rings that many of those 5-time All-Star inductees have.
However, when you factor in his stretch of success in Minnesota, his Olympic Gold Medal, and the fact that he was the second-best player (albeit a very distant second) on a runner-up team in 2018, I think he’s at the point where missing out on the Hall of Fame for him would be a surprise, and any additional accomplishments in his career from here on out would just further cement his worthiness for the Hall of Fame.