I think this has played a part - I took a 5 year sample from the 2010's and a 5 year sample from the 1990's. During the 1990's, teams averaged 15.8 turnovers per game and 8.3 steals per game. During the 2010's, this dropped to 14.3 turnovers and 7.7 steals - this DESPITE the fact that Pace (possessions per 48 minutes) actually increased from 95.1 to 97.3 during the periods I looked at. So in other words - teams are playing faster, but turning the ball over less. One interesting (to me) sidenote - if you look at the leaderboard for turnovers, you'll see that there are a lot more recent players in the top 20 than there are in the steals. LeBron, Kobe, Jason Kidd, Paul Pierce, Steve Nash, Dwyane Wade, and Russ Westbrook are all in the top 20. That means that even though TEAMS are turning the ball over less, INDIVIDUALS are accounting for more of the turnovers. I just thought it was interesting that for all the talk of "Pace and Space" and a reduction in isolation-heavy offenses, there are actually a lot of players who are clearly accounting for more of their teams possessions than players in the 80's and 90's did (I'm assuming that LeBron, Kobe, etc's ranking is due to them having a higher usage rate, rather than them being more "turnover prone" than previous players.)