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 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."