The History of the NBA

The National Basketball Association, or the NBA as it’s commonly known, started in 1946 when several of the owners of some of the major ice hockey rinks around the US thought that it would be profitable to start a national basketball league that would bring teams to play in their arenas in major cities during the hockey off seasons. Originally the NBA basketball teams were not from major cities but as more and more large cities invested in having a basketball team more basketball team franchises began to pop up. In the beginning the NBA basketball teams moved around quite a bit from city to city and many of the teams that are associated with particular cities today like the Boston Celtics started out in other cities originally.

Fans of modern NBA basketball teams are usually a bit surprised to find out that NBA basketball teams were not fully integrated racially until 1950. Today many of the top NBA basketball players are African-American but in the early 1940s when the NBA was started African-Americans were not welcomed onto the NBA teams. The Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks, and the Washington Capitols were the first NBA basketball teams to add African-American players to their player rosters. A lot of people tend to think of legal racial discrimination as a thing that happened very long ago but it wasn’t too long ago in the history of the US that African-Americans were openly discriminated against by the laws of the country.

In the 1970’s the NBA faced still competition from the ABA or the American Basketball Association which was a competing basketball league. The two leagues fought to get large cities that had not committed to participating in any league to sign up with them. Ultimately, the NBA settled with the ABA and four of the best ABA teams were made part of the NBA. Today most of the major cities in the US now proudly host NBA basketball teams.