History of the NBA and Professional Basketball

Introduction

Basketball is among the youngest of the major team sports, invented in December 1891 by the Canadian-American physical education instructor James Naismith at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. The sport's invention was a deliberate response to a specific institutional need — the need for an indoor athletic activity that could occupy young men during the New England winters when outdoor sports were impractical. Naismith's elegantly simple solution, hanging two peach baskets at opposite ends of a gymnasium and inventing thirteen original rules that governed an indoor ball game played by teams attempting to throw the ball into the opposing basket, has produced one of the most widely played and culturally significant team sports in the world.

The National Basketball Association (NBA), the dominant professional basketball league in the world, was founded in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America (BAA) before merging in 1949 with the older National Basketball League to form the modern NBA. The league has been contested annually since 1946 and has grown into one of the most commercially successful and culturally influential professional sports leagues in the world. The league's current 30 franchises are distributed across the United States and Canada, with players from approximately 40 nations represented on team rosters. The NBA Finals draw cumulative television audiences exceeding one billion viewers globally, and the various NBA stars including Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and others have been among the most recognized athletes in the world.

This article surveys the full history of basketball from Naismith's December 1891 invention through the early development of the sport at the YMCA and college levels, the various professional leagues that emerged in the early twentieth century, the 1946 founding of the BAA and the 1949 NBA merger, the era-by-era champions and dominant teams from George Mikan's Minneapolis Lakers through the Bill Russell Boston Celtics dynasty through the Wilt Chamberlain era through Magic Johnson's Los Angeles Lakers and Larry Bird's Boston Celtics through Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls dynasty through Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan through LeBron James through the modern era of Stephen Curry and Nikola Jokic, the 1992 Olympic Dream Team that transformed international basketball, the founding of the WNBA in 1996 and the rise of women's professional basketball, the iconic moments and rivalries that have defined the sport, the broader globalization of professional basketball through the modern era, and the future of a sport now nearly 135 years old. Basketball is among the most consequential American cultural exports of the twentieth century, and its history is among the great cultural narratives of modern professional sport.

James Naismith and the Invention of Basketball (1891)

James Naismith was born in 1861 in Almonte, Ontario, Canada, the son of Scottish immigrants. He received undergraduate degrees from McGill University in Montreal (1887) and from Presbyterian College in Montreal (1890), originally intending a career as a Presbyterian minister but gradually shifting his focus to physical education. He moved to the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1890 to teach physical education and to develop the YMCA's broader curriculum. In December 1891, the school's superintendent Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick asked Naismith to develop an indoor athletic activity that could be played during the winter months when the harsh New England weather made outdoor sports impractical for the school's students.

Naismith had two weeks to develop an indoor game that would maintain physical conditioning during the winter while also being safe enough to play without producing the substantial injuries that had been characterizing other indoor activities including football variants and various tackling games. He drew on various influences from his Canadian childhood including a children's game called "Duck on a Rock" and his observations of the various team sports that he had encountered. He decided that the new game would require the players to throw the ball into a target rather than to physically contact opposing players, would not involve running with the ball (which would have produced the same physical contact problems as football), and would use a soft ball rather than the harder football or baseball.