National Basketball Association

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The National Basketball Association traces its first official game to the 1st of November 1946, when the Toronto Huskies hosted the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens. A player named Ossie Schectman made the very first basket. That single moment launched what would become the second-wealthiest professional sports league in the world by revenue, trailing only the National Football League. Thirty teams now compete across the United States and Canada, each playing an 82-game regular season from October through April, before a playoff tournament culminating in the NBA Finals. How did a league born in hockey arenas grow into a global institution whose players rank as the highest paid athletes on earth by average annual salary? The answer runs through a series of mergers, dynasties, labor battles, and one of the most closely watched talent pipelines in professional sport.

• 2. Two Leagues Become One

  ›

  The Basketball Association of America was founded in 1946 by owners of major ice hockey arenas in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and Canada. Its promoters believed large arenas in major cities would give professional basketball a legitimacy it had never quite achieved. The problem was that early BAA basketball was not clearly superior to its rivals. The 1947 American Basketball League finalist Baltimore Bullets moved to the BAA and won its 1948 title. The 1948 National Basketball League champion Minneapolis Lakers then won the 1949 BAA title, making the case for superiority awkward.

  Before the 1948-49 season, the BAA lured four NBL franchises away with the promise of big venues like Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden. The NBL responded by outbidding the BAA for players, signing Al Cervi, rookie Dolph Schayes, and five standouts from the University of Kentucky. With both leagues financially strained, they agreed to merge on the 3rd of August 1949, creating the National Basketball Association. BAA president Maurice Podoloff became the NBA's first president; NBL chairman Ike Duffey took the chairman role. Crucially, the new league adopted the BAA's history and statistics as its own but left NBL records behind.

  The merged organization started with 17 franchises spread across large and small cities, but contracted sharply. By 1954-55 only eight teams remained, among them franchises that still exist today under new names and in new cities. The league introduced the 24-second shot clock in 1954, a rule change that forced teams to attempt a shot within that window and ended the stalling tactics that had made earlier games tedious to watch.

• 3. Breaking the Color Line

  ›

  Japanese-American Wataru Misaka is considered to have broken the NBA color barrier in the 1947-48 season, when he played for the New York Knicks in the BAA. He was the league's only non-white player until 1950, when Harold Hunter signed with the Washington Capitols. Hunter was cut during training camp, but three other African-American players followed later that same year: Chuck Cooper with the Boston Celtics, Nathaniel "Sweetwater" Clifton with the Knicks, and Earl Lloyd with the Washington Capitols.

  While that integration was taking hold, the Minneapolis Lakers were establishing themselves as the league's first dynasty, led by center George Mikan, whom the league recognized as its first superstar. The Lakers won five championships during this period. Their dominance would eventually give way to a rivalry so intense it became one of the defining stories of American team sports: the confrontation between center Bill Russell, who joined the Boston Celtics in 1957, and center Wilt Chamberlain, who entered the league with the Warriors in 1959.

  Chamberlain set single-game records in scoring with 100 points and in rebounding with 55, figures that have never been matched. Yet it was Russell's Celtics who defined the decade. Led by Russell, guard Bob Cousy, and coach Red Auerbach, Boston won eight consecutive championships from 1959 to 1966, the longest championship streak in the history of American professional sports.

• 4. Rival Leagues and Rising Stars

  ›

  In 1967, the American Basketball Association launched as a direct competitor to the NBA, setting off a bidding war that shaped both organizations. The NBA secured the era's most important college recruit, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then known as Lew Alcindor. But the ABA pulled away the NBA's leading scorer, Rick Barry, along with four veteran referees: Norm Drucker, Earl Strom, John Vanak, and Joe Gushue. The ABA also signed Julius Erving of the Virginia Squires and allowed teams to sign college undergraduates, giving it an advantage in the race for young talent.

  Also in 1969, designer Alan Siegel created the modern NBA logo, drawing on the same approach he had used the previous year for the Major League Baseball logo. The silhouette at the center is based on a photograph of Jerry West, though the NBA has declined to formally confirm that identification. Siegel explained the league preferred to keep the figure anonymous, saying "They want to institutionalize it rather than individualize it." The logo debuted in 1971 and has remained the league's primary visual mark, aside from a typography revision in 2017.

  From 1966 to 1974, the NBA grew from nine franchises to 18, adding the Portland Trail Blazers, Cleveland Cavaliers, Buffalo Braves, and New Orleans Jazz along the way. After the 1976 season, the ABA-NBA rivalry ended with a merger that brought four ABA franchises into the NBA: the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and New York Nets. The NBA also adopted the ABA's three-point field goal rule in 1979, the same year rookies Larry Bird and Magic Johnson entered the league with the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers respectively.

• 5. Jordan, Dreams, and Dynasties

  ›

  Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had faced each other in the 1979 NCAA Division I Basketball Championship Game before becoming NBA rivals. In the 10 seasons of the 1980s, Johnson led the Lakers to five titles while Bird led the Celtics to three. Bird also won the first three three-point shooting contests the league held. On the 1st of February 1984, David Stern became commissioner of the NBA, a role he would hold for 30 years.

  Michael Jordan entered the league in 1984 with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan and Scottie Pippen led the Bulls to two three-peats in eight years during the 1991-1998 seasons. The Detroit Pistons interrupted that ascent briefly, winning back-to-back championships in 1989 and 1990 under coach Chuck Daly and guard Isiah Thomas. Hakeem Olajuwon also seized two consecutive titles with the Houston Rockets in 1994 and 1995, during Jordan's first retirement.

  The 1992 Olympic basketball Dream Team, the first to feature current NBA stars, included Jordan as the anchor alongside Bird, Johnson, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Scottie Pippen, Clyde Drexler, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Chris Mullin, Charles Barkley, and NCAA amateur Christian Laettner. The team was later elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a unit, and 11 of its 12 players were inducted individually as well. In 1995, the league expanded to Canada with the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Toronto Raptors, and in 1996 it created the Women's National Basketball Association.

• 6. The Global Game

  ›

  Pioneers like Vlade Divac of Serbia and Dražen Petrović of Croatia arrived in the NBA in the late 1980s, opening a path that transformed the league's composition. The 2013-14 season opened with a record 92 international players on opening night rosters, representing 39 countries and accounting for more than 20 percent of the league. By the start of the 2017-18 season, 108 international players from 42 countries were on rosters, with every team carrying at least one.

  On the 9th of November 2007, the Houston Rockets with Yao Ming faced the Milwaukee Bucks with Yi Jianlian, and over 200 million people in China watched across 19 different networks. That made it the most-viewed game in NBA history at the time. The league's biggest international market is China, where an estimated 800 million viewers watched the 2017-18 season, and NBA China is valued at approximately $4 billion.

  In 2018, the Phoenix Suns hired Serbian coach Igor Kokoškov, replacing Canadian interim coach Jay Triano, making Kokoškov the first European head coach in NBA history. For seven consecutive seasons from 2018-19 through 2024-25, the league's MVP award was given to an international player. The 2023-24 season saw the Mavericks and the Thunder each carrying eight international players on their rosters, a marker of how thoroughly the league's talent base had spread beyond North America.

• 7. Parity and the Present

  ›

  After a Warriors dynasty that produced six Finals appearances in eight years, the NBA entered what many observers began calling a parity era. Seven different champions were crowned in the seven years from 2019 to 2025, the longest such stretch in league history. A 2023 collective bargaining agreement reinforced that shift by penalizing teams whose payrolls exceeded certain luxury tax thresholds, making it significantly harder for any franchise to assemble multiple maximum-contract superstars at once.

  The Denver Nuggets, led by center Nikola Jokić, won the franchise's first championship in the 2022-23 season by defeating the Miami Heat in five games. The following season, the Boston Celtics won their 18th championship over the Dallas Mavericks, their first title since 2008. The Oklahoma City Thunder then defeated the Indiana Pacers in seven games in the 2025 NBA Finals, claiming their second title in franchise history and their first since relocating from Seattle.

  Commissioner Adam Silver described the intent behind the league's competitive structure directly: "We set out to create a system that allowed for more competition around the league. The goal being to have 30 teams all in the position, if well managed, to compete for championships." The 2025-26 season opened the first year of an 11-year broadcast deal with ABC, NBC, ESPN, Peacock, and Amazon Prime Video, the most expansive media arrangement in the league's history.