In 2001, while Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant were thriving, four high school players were taken in the top eight picks of the draft. Kwame Brown became the first prep-to-pros star to go No. 1. Within four years, the NBA banned drafting 18-year-olds.
The NBA is always changing, and teams constantly copy each other until, without fail, there's saturation. Today's trend frequently becomes tomorrow's tomfoolery.
"Everyone was obsessed with the international prospects 20 years ago, too," one longtime NBA executive said. "Then, Nikoloz Tskitishvili and Darko Milicic went top five and slowed that right down."
There was talk about the league going too far again this week as executives and coaches absorbed the Jaylen Brown trade. They knew why it happened and also feared what it meant. Here's what they said about the deal and other trends after a wild first week of free agency:
The leaguewide conversation spurred by the Jaylen Brown trade
The Brown deal instantly got people in their feelings about the Celtics' choice to trade one of their cornerstone players, the old-school vs. new-school conversation heating up with every take. When ESPN's Shams Charania broke the news of the deal, league executives were on the phones trying to figure out what had happened. Social media erupted. Everyone was awaiting Brown's next Twitch stream.
The conversation began six weeks ago after Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson said, while his team trailed 3-0 to the eventual champion New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals, that based on the analytics, the Cavs should've been up 2-1 in the series.
It was one of the defining lines of this past postseason, if for no other reason than the league had trouble rationalizing how the New York Knicks morphed into an unbeatable force that defied predictive analysis.
And now this trade, Brown for Paul George and draft assets, could become the defining moment of the offseason.
"Here we go again," one veteran assistant coach said. "It was the 3-pointers and then the rest and now the analytics. We always go too far."
Andscape columnist Marc Spears, who has been inducted into the media wing of the Naismith Hall of Fame, compared trading a Finals MVP in his prime to the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees.
Yahoo columnist Tom Haberstroh, one of the top analytical writers of the past 15 years, pointed out that the Celtics are 36-6 over the past three seasons in games in which Brown doesn't play.
It is the most basic of stats among a swath of more advanced ones that support the Celtics' decision to move on from Brown -- not because Brown isn't a good player, but because he isn't a valuable one at his $57 million salary, especially contrasted, for example, with teammate Payton Pritchard's $7 million salary.
Still, some league insiders remain flummoxed.
"The league is overrun with strategy," an Eastern Conference scout said. "Honestly, I'm not sure how many people who work in the league are actually watching the games."
"Yes, there are more graduate degrees in front offices now, but that's only part of the picture," a Western Conference general manager said. "The aprons force you to analyze all of your spending more and put more attention to detail on getting the most out of each salary slot. The owners put that into the rules, and the players accepted it. This is all a choice."
As with any trend, there is often a first-mover advantage. The Celtics used math to win the 2024 NBA title, 3-point shooting their way to all sorts of records with coach Joe Mazzulla, a steadfast devotee of a process-over-results strategy, becoming the latest NBA thought leader.
But the Brown deal, in which the Celtics seemed to rely on advanced metrics, at least in part, to make the decision, has some who viewed them as pioneers questioning how far they're pushing it.
"We're going to turn into baseball if we're not careful," a Western Conference executive said. "Where you have every defender between second base and right field, and no one can get a hit and it becomes boring."
After winning the title, the Celtics were bought by Bill Chisholm, who went to Dartmouth and Wharton and funded the deal with a complex layering of private equity firms putting in institutional funds to assemble his record $6 billion purchase. There are several NBA teams with private equity investors and owners who made their money in high finance, but the Celtics are at the top of that pyramid, and their methodology certainly matches.
"Let me tell you, they did not become less analytical after that," an Eastern Conference executive said. "Private equity wants the answers to the test."
Another interesting aspect of this trade is that the 76ers recently fired Daryl Morey, the godfather of the NBA's analytics movement. This deal is the first major move executed by new president of basketball operations Mike Gansey, a former college basketball star who grinded his way up the chain in Cleveland's front office as a scout.
This trade has enormous potential value for the 76ers as they shed George's contract, which will pay him $115 million over the next two seasons. Had they wanted to get it off their books in a different deal, they might've had to spend the same draft capital to do it.
As some league sources suggested, you could make a case that the Sixers are getting Brown for "free" or close to it. Morey might have jumped at it, too, under those circumstances.
What are people saying about all these centers getting paid?
Speaking of trends, being tall is back in fashion, and the league is spending to get it.
League executives have been struck by the money being spent on centers this summer. The Lakers traded two first-rounders, two second-rounders and two swaps to Utah in a sign-and-trade for Walker Kessler, whom they hope will become their franchise center for Luka Doncic's prime years, and then Los Angeles signed him to a four-year, $130 million deal.
"There's several teams who wanted Kessler for a few years, and if it had been a truly open market, other teams might've been willing to make a similar [trade] offer," one NBA personnel director said. "But I'd be worried about doing a big deal with the Ainges [Jazz front office leaders Danny and Austin] just on principle."
In another example of the demand for big men in the dawning age of Victor Wembanyama, Kristaps Porzingis, who has played just 74 games over the past two seasons, got two years and $40 million from the Warriors.
Robert Williams III, who has a long history of injuries, got three years and $44 million from Portland.
Mitchell Robinson, who averaged less than 20 minutes a game last season, got three years and $47 million from Boston.
Jock Landale, a career backup, got a one-year, $14 million deal from Atlanta. Moritz Wagner, coming off a season-ending left ACL tear, was given a two-year, $19 million contract to be a backup in Brooklyn. And this list could go on. (Not all are fully guaranteed).
"I haven't seen it talked about at all, but what the Thunder got [Isaiah] Hartenstein for might be one of the deals of summer," one East executive said.
Hartenstein signed a three-year, $75 million extension in OKC, a mild pay cut in average annual value from his previous deal.
What is being said about the lower-than-expected salary cap?
Two years ago this month, the NBA signed its new 11-year media rights deals with ESPN, NBC and Amazon for more than $77 billion, tripling the previous deal in total value.
To avoid a big spike in the salary cap, which happened with the last rights deal in 2016 when it escalated 35% in one year and the Warriors were able to sign Kevin Durant, the players' union and the league agreed to smooth the influx of money and limit the salary cap to a maximum of 10% increases per year over three years.
With so much new money coming in, there was an operating assumption that the cap would hit that 10% mark in the first year of the new money.
But when the league announced its figures last week, the cap increase was "just" 6.7%. The NBA had warned teams it would come in lower than anticipated, but this was even less than previously forecast.
The reason for the reduction was a shorter-than-expected postseason, with the Knicks' dominance cutting the Eastern Conference finals and Finals short, sources said. But the overall drag is a result of slashed local TV earnings.
The new national money has made the local TV issue less of a factor, but it's definitely impacting revenues.
It was driven home last year, when even the big-market Knicks agreed to a 28% reduction in annual payments from MSG, which is a sister company. This past season, they took a $41 million pay cut.
This is repeating itself across the league and likely will remain an issue this upcoming season. The NBA is targeting a solution in 2027, when most local rights deals are up, and they are hoping to package them to one partner.
"It's one of the most significant financial things going on in the league right now," one team president said. "It's played at least some role in moving forward with expansion."
