Two seasons ago the Indiana Pacers’ transaction trees were a tangled mess, but now they have gotten a lot less complicated.

Before Ian Mahinmi left the Indiana Pacers this summer for the Washington Wizards, he was the last remaining part of a long, tangled, complicated, and confusing web of transactions that were all connected to the Frenchman.

In all, 22 players in the Pacers’ past were linked to Mahinmi.

But with his departure, the Indiana Pacers transaction trees got a lot less weird.

For those of you not familiar with the idea of transactions trees, the concept is pretty simple. It is just looking at a player’s history and seeing how they were acquired, what moves made that happen, and how it all is connected to the present.

For a player to be considered a direct part of a transaction tree he is the product of the same linked sequence of trades or acquisitions. A player can be drafted or traded and as long as the series of moves is connected. If you don’t understand how the trees work, it will become clear once you start looking at them.

It is a family tree of sorts. Maybe Dale Davis has almost no direct effect on Rakeem Christmas, but if you follow the chain of transactions, you’ll see the two are linked through Indiana’s history.

We’ll work our way through the different trees, beginning with the simpler (and newer) ones and trace our way back to the oldest and most complicated — which is the Rakeem Christmas’ tree, and I swear to you that pun was not on purpose.

So let’s start with the draft picks…