WESTFIELD, Ind. — When Gilbert Johnson played, the game was different.

Guards were guards and forwards were forwards. No one called himself a “stretch” anything. There were wings who straddled the line between shooting guard and small forward, but generally everyone else knew where they stood, and Johnson certainly did. As a 6-foot-8, 235-pounder on Pitt teams that competed in the rough-and-tumble Big East in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Johnson was expected to spend all of his limited minutes in the paint playing as physical a style as possible.

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“I was a banger,” Johnson says. “That’s it.”

But now basketball is headed to the point of becoming positionless. The smallest guys are still generally point guards and the biggest ones play center, but anything goes for the players in between. Depending on your perspective, three of the best players in the world — LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Kevin Durant — are players who are taller than Johnson but often bring the ball up and frequently operate from the perimeter. Meanwhile, the two-time NBA defending champion Golden State Warriors are frequently using someone smaller than Johnson was in college — 6-7, 230-pound Draymond Green — as their dynamic starting center. He averages more assists than anyone else on the team.

Johnson wasn’t built for that brand of basketball, but he has two sons who very much were with long, lean bodies and versatile skill sets. A little more than a year from now, one of them will be in the NBA and the other will be on scholarship at a major Division I program.

One of them you know already. Cameron Johnson, who at 6-9, 210 pounds is taller but leaner than his dad, was a first-team All-ACC pick at North Carolina this season. His versatile skill set makes him a safe bet to be taken late in the first round or early in the second round of the NBA Draft after averaging 16.9 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.2 steals as a fifth-year senior, making 55.6 percent of his field goal attempts, 45.7 percent of his 3s and 81.8 percent of his free throws. He spent two years at Pitt as a point guard and was on the perimeter for his two seasons at North Carolina.

And now his younger brother is following in his path. After leading Moon Area (Pa.) High School to the Class 5A state championship this year as a junior, Donovan “Puff” Johnson has reached four-star recruit status and is the No. 101 player in the nation according to 247Sports’ composite rankings. He stands somewhere between 6-7 and 6-8 according to his father, but like his brother, he can play anywhere. He’s spending time with two grassroots teams this summer, playing with All-Ohio Red in Nike’s EYBL and Wildcats Select in the Adidas Gauntlet series. All-Ohio Red uses him as sort of a stretch power forward. The Wildcats have two legitimate big men in 7-footer Zach Loveday and 6-8 Obinna Anochili-Killen, so on that squad Johnson plays everything from shooting guard to power forward.

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And thanks to the graduation of several senior guards, when the younger Johnson returns to his squad at Moon, he’ll be running the point.

“The game is changing for people like me who can play all five positions,” Donovan says. “Who can play the wing spot and who can step out and hit 3s. The 3 is becoming a big thing in college. (Coaches) want players who can play all five positions and plug and play.”

A lot of coaches clearly want him for that reason. Indiana hasn’t offered yet, but coach Archie Miller, who grew up not far from where the Johnsons live, has started to show interest. Miller’s brother Sean, Gilbert Johnson’s former teammate at Pitt and the embattled coach at Arizona, has offered.

North Carolina coach Roy Williams attended Johnson’s games with Wildcats Select in Dallas during the evaluation period in late April, and offered a scholarship this week. Auburn, Louisville, Maryland, Miami, Ohio State, Penn State, Pitt and Xavier have all offered. Alabama and Notre Dame are in the mix. John Beilein had been in contact before leaving Michigan to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers. The list seems to only be getting bigger as coaches see a player who can do for them what his brother did at UNC.

Gilbert would like to take more credit for producing two sons who fit so well into the way the game has evolved, but he can’t deny that a lot of it comes from the other half of their gene pool. His wife, Amy Schuler-Johnson, was a 1,000-point scorer at Kent State from 1982-86 and a professional in a league that was a precursor to the WNBA. At 5-foot-11, she had a multi-positional game that was much closer to what her sons play now, and Gilbert acknowledges she was better at more sports than he was.

“She was a 1, 2, 3, 4,” he says. “She was way ahead of her time. She played point, but she did everything else. And she was a very, very good athlete. When I say a good athlete, she was MVP in softball at shortstop. MVP in volleyball. She still plays my oldest son and his 26-year-old girlfriend in tennis two-on-one, and she beats them. Cameron and Puff, that’s where they get it from. Every sport they played growing up, they were good at. Just like their mother.”

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Gilbert has been coaching both of his boys for years, and he and Amy work with them together. The Johnsons also have an older son Aaron who is 26 and a younger son Braylon, who is in eighth grade. Aaron set the scoring record at Moon before going to Princeton and later playing at Division II Clarion north of Pittsburgh. That makes for some brutal backyard three-on-three games, and it also makes for valuable teaching from Gilbert and Amy.

“My dad was a big bruiser at Pitt who would give strong minutes and be big,” Donovan says, “but my mom was a guard and more like me and could relate to me and Cam more. And my dad’s been coaching and watching and been around basketball for 40 years, and he knows what to do at the next level. They’ve always trained me.”

Donovan has the luxury of following in Cameron’s footsteps, which has allowed him to attempt to mirror his successes and prepare for the obstacles his brother encountered. As a result, there are areas in which he is advanced beyond where his brother was at this stage of his career. He’s had less work at point guard, but he’s arguably more developed in the rest of his game. Both were good shooters, but Donovan made 8 of 10 3-pointers in a game for All-Ohio Red at the EYBL and averaged 17.0 points in four games.

“I think he’s a little bit ahead of Cam at this age,” Moon coach Adam Kaufman says. “I think he has a little bit more of an edge to him, a little more physicality. He shoots the ball a little better, and he has a little bit of a smoother stroke. I think he’s putting it on the floor really well now, attacking the basket a little better. He’s added some post game to his repertoire. He can play over both shoulders, has nice touch around the rim.”

Unlike their father, who still cuts the muscular figure of an old-school Big East power forward, the Johnson boys have been slow to physically develop. Donovan is listed at 190 pounds, and even though he’s comfortable with his post moves, he needs some more muscle and muscle definition if he’s going to be able to play and defend all five positions at the next level.

“I’m working on getting in the post and guarding bigger players,” Donovan says. “That’s what I’m going to have to do in college. If I’m going to play a wing spot, they’re going to have to plug and play. I have to worry about guarding bigger players and playing more physical in the post. That’s what they saw in Cameron when he grew a lot; he wasn’t comfortable playing in the post. They’re trying to start me earlier.”

Because even in the era of positionless basketball, Donovan still has to be able to do what his father did.

(Photo of Donovan Johnson: Courtesy of Wildcats Select travel program)