CHICAGO — It was not exactly a lovefest when Bob Love arrived in Chicago on Nov. 23, 1968.

The Milwaukee Bucks dealt Love and Bob Weiss to the Bulls before a game against the Atlanta Hawks at Chicago Stadium, and both he and Weiss were relegated to the bench that night.

“The crowd of 4,169 was not too happy about the news, judging from the reaction when the new men were introduced,” Chicago Tribune beat reporter Bob Logan wrote.

The Bulls were an afterthought in the Chicago sports world then, and there was no certainty the young franchise would survive. Chicago was not a pro basketball town, it was often said, and the lack of interest in the Bulls was living proof.

But that all changed, thanks in no small part to Love, who died Monday at age 81.

An unremarkable player who was considered a throw-in to a trade that centered around Weiss and Flynn Robinson, Love blossomed into a great scorer and defender and held the Bulls’ all-time scoring record until 1990, when a guy named Michael Jordan passed him.

His accomplishments on and off the court endeared him to Chicago, and his death reminds us of a time when the same core of players kept fans on their feet and rocked the Stadium on many a cold winter’s night.

The early 1970s was an era of Bulls basketball that still lives in our hearts, even after the Jordan era eclipsed it and took the franchise to a different level, on par with the New York Yankees and Real Madrid as international brands.

Love, Chet Walker, Jerry Sloan, Norm Van Lier and Tom Boerwinkle formed the nucleus of those Bulls teams that averaged 53 wins a season from 1970-71 to 1974-75 but always ended in heartbreak, usually at the hands of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Their closest call came in the 1975 postseason, when the Bulls led the Golden State Warriors 3-2 in the Western Conference finals, only to lose at home on Mother’s Day and again in Game 7 in Oakland, Calif.

“Incredible heartache,” former general manager Pat Williams recalled years later.

The Bulls are such a huge brand now that the early struggles before “Butterbean” came on the scene are difficult for some newbie fans to imagine.

“We built a ballclub and tried every conceivable promotion tried by man,” Williams told me in a 1991 interview. “We threw an awful lot of mud against the wall, but our job was to, as quickly as possible, expose the sport to Chicagoans. Most of them weren’t interested. We had to give them a show every night.”

One night in the early years, a paltry crowd of 594 showed up for a loss to the Seattle SuperSonics. The late Ben Bentley, the Bulls publicist who later moderated “The Sportswriters,” the grandfather of sports debate shows, once recalled the NBA commissioner wrote a “very searing letter” to then-owner Dick Klein.

“It said, ‘Don’t give out any figures like that,’ ” Bentley said.

Things slowly changed in Love’s second season in Chicago, in which he scored 21 points per game, the first of six straight seasons he averaged 20-plus. But it was the Bulls’ airtight defense that made them lovable in their fans’ eyes. They annually led the league in floor burns, led by Van Lier and Sloan, and earned the respect of everyone around the league for their tenacity.

Current Bulls coach Billy Donovan remarked Monday that this year’s team has taken only two charges all season, a stat that would make Van Lier and Sloan cringe if they were alive today.

Love wasn’t always happy in Chicago because of contract disputes with management, and he asked to be traded after the 1975-76 season, getting his wish the following November.

He told the Tribune during the Jordan era: “I should have never been allowed to leave Chicago. They have better management now and better exposure. With that, I think I would have stayed because fans and (the media) would have made them keep me. I love this town, and I would have loved to have finished my career here. But at the time, it wasn’t right.”

Normally that would be the end of the story. A beloved player endures a bitter ending, and his accomplishments are overlooked as the years go by.

But Love’s saga was only beginning. After his NBA career ended, he was forced to bus dishes at a Nordstrom in Seattle to make a living, an unimaginable tale today with players’ multimillion-dollar salaries.

A debilitating stutter severely damaged Love’s ability to make a living outside of basketball. He said he was famous enough to get job interviews but was “humiliated” by the experience because “once they realized I couldn’t talk, they would pick up the phone or just walk out of the room.”

Love could not have been at a lower point in his life.

“To not be able to talk, to have so, so many things you want to say and to know people think you are dumb because you can’t is one of the worst nightmares you can imagine,” he said.

John Nordstrom, co-chairman of the department store, saw Love at work in the store’s cafe and offered to pay for speech therapy.

“It just didn’t seem right that this man who had known such success would be busing tables in our little cafe,” Nordstrom later told the Tribune.

After six months of intensive therapy, Love was confident enough not only to talk, but also to start giving speeches, which he did regularly for years. He said his dream was to “talk to every child in America” to show what they could overcome.

“Never play the victim,” was his oft-stated motto.

Helping turn Chicago into a pro basketball town and bringing success to the Bulls in the ’70s was what made Love a beloved athlete in this city.

But perhaps his true legacy was teaching young people to believe in themselves in spite of the odds, a timeless lesson he learned the hard way.

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