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Critical thinking for a critical time.

Today we are going back to our basketball butterfly effect series with Aria Shirazia.

Ooh, boy, do we have a butterfly effect to speak to you about today?

Let me set it up and then I'll introduce

Aria to make it all plain. Okay, look, we all know that today's NBA is dominated by players

not only not born in the United States, but also who never went through the U.S. high school or college

systems. I mean, just think of who are the indisputably best players in the NBA. They have names

like Nicola Yokic, Luca Donchich, Janis Antecumpo, Thanassus Ante, no, just kidding

with that last one. But also, you have to say, even though he's been hurt, Joel Ambide, who, yes, did go to Kansas for one year, but for the purposes of this discussion, we're counting him on our list of people who did not go through the U.S. system and yet are absolutely the top of the pyramid in today's NBA.

And frankly, has made it a much better, more exciting and amazing sport.

The question that we're going to ask, though, is how did we get here with this amazing talent born outside the U.S. pipeline?

And Aria and I are going to argue that two pivot points caused this change.

And I'm going to get Aria to elucidate on this.

The first was the one that pretty much everyone says when they speak of the globalization of talent,

which is the 92 Dream Team going with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, which revealed

to a richer degree how much talent was out there.

We know that.

But there's another pivot as well.

That's frankly, a lot of our history could be different without this.

The shockingly bad bronze medal performance of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team, the last year

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