You can't help but hear the word every time any sort of team-building- or front office-related discussion (which is basically the only sort of discussions that happen during the offseason).

• The JB supermax extension talks: "You have to retain the asset, you have to sign him".

• The Gobert trade: "Minnesota gave up way too many assets for Gobert"

• Lillard trade talks: "He's a small, aging guard, which likely makes him a rapidly depreciating asset, so it's not clear that he'd warrant a massive return like, say, Durant."

It's common now to refer to players and draft picks as assets rather than as, well, players and draft picks. It's so normal that I think the weirdness, or at least the novelty of the whole thing, often gets glossed over. An asset is a fundamentally financial concept that is spoken of purely in economic, almost Manichean terms where the asset is either positive or negative. Before the rise of Moneyball-style thinking, which is really just the application of economic methodology (a hard drive toward data-based analysis) to sports, players weren't evaluated is such abstract, financialized terms. This led to blindspots, of course, such as an overvaluation of, say, inefficient high-volume scorers. Teams are better now at evaluating talent than before, likely in part because of this empirical methodology imported from economics. But does thinking about players and draft picks as assets lead to new blindspots where maximizing value from trades and contracts in addition to searching hard for market inefficiencies causes some to lose sight of the importance of on-court play?

I'm hewing a bit hard to the classic "is analytics a good thing for the sport??", which is not something I want to relitigate, as it's been done to death at this point. I want instead to just focus on what I'd term the "financialization" of the NBA, where teams are run more like other economic ventures like a private equity firm and players are viewed not as individuals who are part of teams that are trying to win basketball but as an agglomeration of values that are either net negatives or positives for organization.

A few questions that this whole shift has me thinking on:

• Am I being shortsighted and not realizing that this sort of thinking has been around for longer than the last 15ish years?

• Were NBA organizations really that incompetent prior to this sort of thinking? There're plenty of stories of bad GMs in NBA history (Zeke, Kahn, Baylor, etc.) and it doesn't seem like as many bad decisions are being made. Are GMs really better at building their teams now or is that just recency bias?

• Do we fans, who have very little knowledge about the actual operation of an NBA franchise insofar as we don't have access to the day-to-day discussions that happen in a front office, lean too hard on this assetized view of NBA players?

• Is this sort of financialized thinking about the NBA good for the sport, both from a perspective of winning and, more controversially, from the perspective of producing an entertaining product?