It's not about keeping the best players. It's about keeping the cheapest B and C players to do a good enough job to keep the lights on. This isn't about excelling through amazing talent. Nike, like Apple, has transitioned into a churn and burn corporation producing perfectly fine but somewhat bland iterations of the same product year after year. We're not about innovating, it's about squeezing every last bit of margin out of our repetitive, boring products that a certain segment of the consumer base will keep buying. Institutional knowledge and experience is not valued when all your leaders are new to Nike and have none of that experience themselves. We are being led by technocrats, bankers and business consultants, so no one should be surprised if they are mostly operating through a lens of finance vs. talent.
Perfectly stated by @kya+1qzQMRm4.