80 YEARS OF THE NBA From peach baskets to a billion dollars For anniversaries like this November’s, America’s NBA league transforms into a living museum. Teams don retro jerseys from past decades, logos on the court are given golden outlines, and old rivalries are reinvigorated before the eyes of new generations T he evening of 1 st Novem- ber 1946 was cold and au- tumnal at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, as the play- ers of the Toronto Huskies and New York Knickerbockers took to the court. New York guard Ossie Shechtman received the ball, made a two-step move and played the ball against the backboard to score. The net swung, and history began to be inscribed. That was the first basket scored in the history of the competition that we now know as the NBA league. That league is this year celebrating precisely 80 years since that moment, marking its of- ficial birthday. It is simply poetic that the first match was played in Canada, because understand- ing how the NBA became the global phe- nomenon it is today requires that we re- turn to 1891 and a Canadian man who was then teaching at a college in Spring- field, Massachusetts. Physical education instructor Dr James Naismith had a prob- lem: the winter was harsh and his students were cranky, filled with energy that they couldn’t expend outside. Naismith took an ordinary soccer ball, nailed two wicker peach baskets to the gallery at each end of the gymnasium, at a height of 10 feet (3.05 metres) – the height that remains the standard today – and wrote 13 basic rules. According to one anecdote, no one thought to cut the bottom out of the bas- ket in those first weeks. As such, a jani-
tor had to be called every time someone scored. He would bring a wooden ladder and climb up to retrieve the ball. The game was terribly slow. It was only when the players got bored waiting for the janitor that the bottom was cut out. And basket- ball came to life. Battle for the throne: Origins and Division Decades later, in the 1940s, basketball remained a semi-amateur sport. The own- ers of the huge arenas of the eastern U.S., where ice hockey was played and circus- es were held, realised that their halls were empty during the winter. This led them to establish the BAA (Basketball Association of America) in 1946. They had the mon- ey and the bright lights, but the most tal- ented basketball players were still compet- ing in the rival NBL (National Basketball
League), which played its matches in the small, working-class towns of the Midwest, sponsored by local factories. This clash be- tween capital from the East and raw tal- ent from the West was resolved through a historic compromise that resulted in the two leagues merging into one entity in Au- gust 1949. The old names were discarded and the NBA (National Basketball Asso- ciation) was born. The vastness of America meant that players were left exhausted after travelling to matches by train through snowstorms. In order for the league to survive, it had to be split geographically. Today’s division in- to Eastern and Western conferences final- ly came about in 1970. Teams from East and West rarely face off during the win- ter months, with the best of both confer- ences only colliding in June, in the myth- ical NBA Finals.
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