1. The technology has changed a ton on basketball fitness, training and practice. SportVU data, improvements to film study thanks to DVR tech and whatnot, VR for injured players, the body monitoring stuff explained
here, and God knows what else that an outsider like me doesn't know about.
2. If you want to measure athletic progression Olympic records are a crappy metric. It measures only one athlete every four years in varying circumstances. If you look at the top 100 performances annually in quantifiable sports you'd see consistent improvement across the board.