The Five True Originals of the 21st-Century NBA

Players steal moves. Coaches rip off plays. Franchises co-opt entire team-building strategies. The NBA is, rather famously, a copycat league—which means that over a long enough timeline, every good idea eventually becomes copied and copied, until one day it loses all resemblance to what made it so successful in the first place. It also means that there’s a lineage to most everything that happens on an NBA court. The game lives and breathes. All you have to do to understand the dominance of the Thunder or the flow of modern offense is trace them back to the source.