Kevin Love is simply a rebounding machine – a pure glass-cleaning beast who is finally receiving the quality minutes for the Minnesota Timberwolves he has deserved for years and is putting up the excellent numbers to prove it. How do thirty-one points, thirty-one boards and a second consecutive win sound, Coach Rambis? Pretty darn good, I bet.

I don’t have a huge chunk of time to post NBA recaps tonight – I will be doing something different for Saturday night’s games and beyond – but after reading about and watching highlights of Love’s performance I couldn’t resist.

This wasn’t an ordinary game, folks. No player had posted 30-plus points and boards in the same contest since the legendary Moses Malone 32 points and 38 rebounds himself in a 1982 game against Seattle.

In case you don’t remember, Mr. Malone happened to snare 16,212 career NBA rebounds – check it out.

Not only that, only four players since the ABA/NBA merger in 1976 have accomplished a 30-30 game - Moses Malone, Robert Parish, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Swen Nater.

He also is the first player to snare thirty boards in a game since Charles Barkley in 1996.

While he may never grab thirty-one boards again his rebounding numbers in the last five games are pretty impressive. Love is averaging over eighteen rebounds and nineteen points per in those contests and the Wolves have won their first back-to-back games this season.

Oh, did I mention he grabbed 15 rebounds in the third quarter ALONE?! Very impressive, indeed.

While Love’s defense leave much to be desired most of the time (pick and roll defense, anyone?) and his offensive game needs fine tuning close to the basket, he works hard on every possession and creates so, so many second chance buckets by out positioning bigs on the offensive glass. He also has a surprisingly sweet mid-range jay and can sink the three with some regularity. Nice stuff for a 6-10 guy.

We all wondered if Love would begin to reach his potential after Al Jefferson was shipped to Utah this offseason. He has been ranked highly in the rebounds-per-minute category since his rookie season and clearly this is proving that his board-snaring skills were no fluke.

Props go out to you, big man. Now try and follow in the great Moses Malone’s footsteps by posting a 25 point, 1,444 rebound season.

Good luck with that.