Outside of a Huizengan* push back everytime an allegedly traditional team wins a ring or an allegedly progressive team fumbles in the playoffs, front offices will make fewer and fewer stupid decisions. Correspondingly, the crafty transactions that smug fans and writers will point to as evidence of a growing divide between smart teams and dumb teams will become fewer and fewer. That wont stop people from shouting about it, though. This reaches a high point when an obviously terrible trade suddenly doesn't look particularly bad. We'll call it "The Krivsky/Kearns Moment".

Eventually, it'll start to appear that the biggest remaining arena for teams is acquisition of amateur players, something which absolutely requires scouting. We'll all be bored and confused about what side we're supposed to be on, until that edge also becomes blurry because of the one stable truth in all of this, that people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are fundamentally unreliable. So, you know, luck kind of matters a lot.

Fashionable teams will win for luck that looks like fashionable reasons. Unfashionable teams will win for luck that looks like unfashionable reasons. I kind of suspect that the true smart teams will be the ones that figure out an effective way to keep their talent healthier than everybody else's, but at the moment that kind of seems like luck too.

*Yep. I've been reading "Autumn of the Middle Ages". Deal with it.