Ricky Rubio wants the opportuniy to try and talk his teammate Kevin Love into staying in Minnesota. The Timberwolves point guard during an interview with NBA.com on Sunday, says he wants to find out why Kevin Love wants to leave.
“I don’t want to convince him if he doesn’t want to stay. But I want him to stay and I’m going to tell him what I think, which is we’ve been improving every year and he’s a great player, he helps us a lot,” Rubio told NBA.com. “I think we need to make the next step. … The media says it’s pretty settled, but I don’t know what he thinks. What I’ve been hearing is from the media, not from him, so I don’t trust that. It can be an opinion from you guys. I just really want to talk to him as a teammate.”
I’m not sure how Rubio’s pitch will go over with Love. The point guard recently criticized Love for not being the leader of the Timberwolves.
Love’s departure from Minnesota could actually make it easier to Rubio to bolt eventually as well. Rubio also made it clear that he didn’t want to be apart of a rebuilding situation.
“If he leaves, it’s going to be painful because he’s a main guy. But it depends what we get back for him,” Rubio told NBA.com. “We’ll see what we can do. I don’t think going through a rebuild year is going to help us because we’ve been improving every year and now we’re so close to making the playoffs that it doesn’t make sense to rebuild it again. It’s not continuing what we were doing.”