Once the news that the Boston Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets were orchestrating a gigantic trade broke Thursday afternoon, the N.B.A. draft might have gotten a little inferiority complex. Sure, it was still a prime-time show and it could still boast the annual ritual of booing Commissioner David Stern, and hey, it had Hakeem Olajuwon dropping by in a tux to remind Stern how long ago his first draft pick was. But all of that became background noise behind the Trade That Would Change Everything — or will change everything for five minutes until Brooklyn realizes that Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett are a combined 147 years old.

This was all about the Nets trying to go big. And when you are run by a Russian oligarch, big is not picking Mason Plumlee with the 22nd pick. No, it’s swiping two of Boston’s Big Three, bringing the Knicks’ most persistent tormentor (Garnett) to Brooklyn, rattling headlines everywhere with the word “blockbuster.” It’s a success on the look-at-us scale, trumpeted as a home run by Mitch Lawrence of The Daily News even as he acknowledges that Pierce and Garnett are a shade this side of ancient and their upside might last a season. Maybe. But it’s still big. After all, nobody is going to miss Gerald Wallace or Kris Humphries and all those silly little draft picks.

In the instant analysis world, the Nets win and the Celtics have seemingly plunged into disarray, as Ian Thomsen writes on SI.com, and Boston’s Big Three era certainly is crashing to an ignominious close, Chris Forsberg writes on ESPN.com. For his part, Marc Spears of Yahoo.com views it the other way, with the Celtics building for the future and the Nets trying to buy a piece of the past. Whatever happens, Ken Berger writes on CBSSports.com, it is the first of the big-money teams testing the limits of the newish collective-bargaining agreement. You sort of get the feeling Mikhail Prokhorov likes the idea of paying a luxury tax. It just sounds rich.

Despite that fantastic distraction Thursday, the draft did go off and earned its slice of attention by being wildly unpredictable. Cleveland got things rolling by picking Nevada-Las Vegas’s Anthony Bennett No. 1, a move almost no one expected. And that, as Andy Katz writes on ESPN.com, was just the start of a parade of surprises. The presumptive No. 1, Nerlens Noel, fell all the way to No. 6 — which Jeff Goodman argues on ESPN.com was a blessing for him — and then found himself shipped from New Orleans to Philadelphia, which Dick Jerardi argues in The Philadelphia Daily News is a great move for the 76ers. It also meant Noel could experience jet lag without even leaving the green room.