The Jaylen Brown trade and the Luka Doncic trade are not wholly similar. For starters, Doncic has proved his worth more strongly—while being a few years younger, he has carried teams with debatable levels of talent around him to the Finals and Conference Finals. That’s just how powerful of an offensive engine he is. Brown has only gone deep into the postseason as part of an inarguably tremendous ensemble. And the Dallas Mavericks, unlike the Boston Celtics, did not broadly survey the league when getting rid of their star player. They only negotiated with one team. Time will confirm which franchise officially did better in sending a major-usage man away, but for now, it’s safe to say that what the Mavericks did was measures more flagrant than what Celtics did.

All that said: both trades stem from the same big shift in how the NBA works. The Player Empowerment Era is no longer a matter of hegemony. This paradigm may have begun earlier than LeBron James’ infamous 2010 “The Decision” TV special, in which he broadcast worldwide his choice of team in free agency, but we’ll use that moment as a beginning—as he sat there in his bright lilac shirt, demanding and achieving the attention of the world, it was clear who had the most power. He did. He has maintained it for a majority of the time since then, bending teams backward to keep his services in the building. More on him later.

Today, with their organizations tossing them aside for something more calculated than idol-centric, the tales of Brown and Doncic can tell us about a much different landscape. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement between players and owners, now three years old, has started to really sink its teeth into how teams are built, and the prominence of the charismatic, do-it-all hero has faded a bit—along with teams’ willingness to operate as these young men please. More and more of these types of players are bumping into lower ceilings, with depth and youth more important than ever, as the teams to most recently get into and win the Finals can tell you.

Along with the more horizontal, less pyramid-shaped vision of team-building comes the empowerment of what we call “analytics.” Like a lot of words that arguments are had around, this one isn’t defined universally or exactly, so let’s start with some table-setting: “analytics” represents the increased amount, and styles of, data and video analysis that teams spend money on and—ultimately—rely on for roster decisions. There are a handful of popular, publicly available “analytics” metrics like RPM, VORP, and Win Shares that are bandied about in broad discussions had for audiences on this topic, but the important stuff is happening behind closed doors, where every front office keeps their secret sauce to themselves.

It’s no coincidence that people with terminal STEM majors are granted more agency in the league at the same time that it chastens its biggest on-court personalities. Take a look at any other business in the 21st century, and you’re likely to see similar trends. There is a battle—cultural, political, economic—between old mythologies and new attempts at science. Who’s winning? No one ever definitively will, but many will claim victory. Certainly, either way, a lot will change as the conflict wears on.

What does this look like, for a normal person, not deeply steeped in the nuanced industrial contours of this specific NBA moment? It looks, for the most part, like management losing their minds. We’re used to seeing iconic players switch teams, and maybe even at a discounted price—deep into their thirties, way past their primes. We are not at all used to seeing them optionally sent away when they’re not at all washed up, and are in fact in the midst of their primes. Both Doncic and Brown had the best seasons of their lives right before getting moved, and the only way you might think they’d go anywhere else is if they commanded it.

Perhaps the double shock of these two trades, illegible within the framework of the 2010-2024 NBA, will accelerate peoples’ understanding of the suddenly new way of doing things. Whether or not it’s good for basketball, the way the wind is blowing is clear, and there will likely be another trade of this persuasion within the next year (if you squint hard enough, you might see the LaMelo Ball deal as the third example that’s already happened). The NBA has always been a star’s league, and it will continue to be thought of and covered by the media as one. But many of the people building the teams seem to think increasingly less in this way.

There was, it is said, an analytics professional within the Mavericks who always thought Doncic should’ve been traded. Though it wasn’t him who pulled the trigger, he supposedly had a data model that backed up what a more casually inclined fan watching Luka would call “ball-hogging.” Brown, too, is said to be less valuable than he appears to the untrained eye, by people whose models tell them that winning in the NBA is, right now, driven primarily by three-point shooting volume and high-level offensive rebounding; neither of which are his strengths.

Give the keys to such people and, it is thought, optimized strategies can be pursued more vigorously—without the individualized, unpredictable types like Brown and Doncic there to dent the way things are done. In this equation, there is significant overlap between who stands out as a personality and who doesn’t do quite what the quants what them to do on the court.

LeBron James, all these years later, finds himself on the same side of history as these guys. He’s 41 years old, so it doesn’t quite count, but let’s keep in mind that he’s the best 41-year-old in NBA history. For the first time in his career, his team told him the past season that they weren’t going to pay him the most money they possibly could the following summer, and that if he were to return to their roster at all, his future inclusion would be highly conditional. They kept the LeBron money to spend on a handful of key role players instead, and now James is doing the endgame version of his old Decision, but it’s not getting the same focus from the basketball world that it used to. We’re all too busy trying to keep up with exactly what the men in the suits are engineering.