Windhorst: NBA execs on the Brown trade, big-money...

playWill Celtics live to regret trading Jaylen Brown? (0:50) 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 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

Windhorst: NBA execs on the Brown trade, big-money...

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Windhorst: NBA execs on the Brown trade, big-money...

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