Love’s transition is sizing up by most standards

If you’re Kevin Love, you can go home again. You just have to find one where they’re happy to see you.

Love, the former UCLA great, if the shortest-tenured of the Bruins greats, came back Sunday night, receiving polite applause when he came off the Minnesota Timberwolves’ bench to enter the game against the Lakers.

Polite applause is good these days. In Portland where Love grew up, he drew mixed boos, although it hardly matched the death threats and obscenities he got from Oregon fans last season when the Bruins played in Eugene.

Nor are Timberwolves fans sure what to make of Love after the draft-day trade that brought him to Minnesota and sent O.J. Mayo to Memphis.

Mayo, Love’s old rival from USC, is averaging 20.8 points in a spectacular start, or 12.0 more than Love.

Making it worse, or a joke no one thinks is funny, Timberwolves fans hadn’t gotten over the 2005 draft day debacle, er, trade that sent Brandon Roy to Portland for Randy Foye.

“It’s not so bad yet,” said the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Jerry Zgoda of the Love-Mayo deal, “because their names don’t rhyme like Roy and Foye.”

By ordinary standards, Love is doing great, averaging 8.8 points and 8.0 rebounds in 24 minutes.

On a rebound-per-minute basis, he’s in the NBA’s top 10. Not that that may eclipse Mayo’s 28 points in Sunday’s win over Miami in every Minnesota fan’s mind.

Then, nothing about Love was ever ordinary, like his year at UCLA when he arrived looking like a 6-foot-10 pear, weighing 275 pounds, with a vertical leap that may or may not have reached double figures, and took the Bruins to the Final Four.

His skill level was off the charts. His personality was dazzling. He always said the right thing, never acknowledging the possibility he might leave . . . until he left.

“For me, too, it was a little bittersweet,” said Love before Sunday’s game, in which he had two points and 10 rebounds.

“I talk to my good friends in my [draft] class, whether it’s Derrick Rose or Mike Beasley or O.J. or Russell [Westbrook], all those guys. They all say, hey, if it made sense, which it didn’t at the time and still doesn’t, we would have gone back because we were having so much fun.”

If Mayo had a smooth transition with a natural NBA position, Love’s jump is more like Evel Knievel at the Snake River Canyon.

“It’s been tough because there are guys who are 7-0, 7-1, and I’m 6-9,” said Love.

“Coach [Kevin McHale] said, ‘Go where they ain’t.’ That’s his favorite thing to say so I’ve been trying to do that.”

Actually, if Love were 6-9, he might be in the All-Star running.

His true height, measured in bare feet at the Orlando pre-draft camp, is 6-7 3/4 .

Before Sunday’s game, he joked that the team’s 18 losses were more than he suffered in high school and college combined.

Then they racked up No. 19.

With McHale stepping down from the front office to replace Randy Wittman, the Timberwolves lost his first game to Utah, 99-96, as Love missed six of nine free throws.

Love was near tears afterward, joking bleakly about needing someone to talk him off the bridge.

The next night in Denver, he said he was OK because, “I didn’t have time to find a bridge high enough.”

Nevertheless, he’s still Kevin Love, so anything is possible, or probable.

“He has some abilities on the basketball court, I’ve never seen from anyone, the ability to throw the outlet pass,” says teammate Mark Madsen.

“I think the next step that’s going to take Kevin from where he is now -- and he does it in practice -- is shooting the three, shooting the long jumper. And I think, as his comfort level continues to grow, that’s going to really stretch defenses out.”

Bruins fans will remember that Love started to shoot three-pointers at about the mid-point of the season, and wound up shooting 35% from the arc.

Already the game’s greatest outlet passer, Love fired one of his vintage three-quarters-of-the-court numbers in Sunday’s first half, hitting a streaking Ryan Gomes for a layup.

After that, the Lakers made it their business to get back on defense, a refreshing change for them.

Nevertheless, it still took the whole game for the Lakers to show which team had 19 wins and which had four.

At least no one can say the Lakers are the worst 19-3 team in the history of the game any more. Of course, as 20-3 teams go, they still don’t blow anyone away.

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mark.heisler@latimes.com