NBA Teams, Leagues and Rules: Facts

Where NBA team names come from, relocations, the ABA story and the rules that changed basketball.

1946 The first game in league history was played in Toronto on 1 November 1946. The New York Knicks beat the Toronto Huskies 68-66.

2 Of the 11 teams that started the league in 1946, only the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks still play in the same city. The Philadelphia Warriors moved west in 1962.

247 The Celtics' famous parquet floor was born of a post-war lumber shortage: in 1946 it was pieced together from 247 panels of oak scraps. The same floor lasted 53 years.

1946 In 1946 Chuck Connors of the Celtics became the first pro player to shatter a backboard, with a simple shot during warm-ups. He later found fame as the star of the TV western The Rifleman.

1949 The NBA got its name in 1949, when the BAA merged with the rival NBL. The first NBA season had 17 teams, including the Sheboygan Red Skins and the Waterloo Hawks.

1951 The first NBA All-Star Game was played at the Boston Garden in March 1951. The East beat the West.

24 The 24-second shot clock arrived in 1954. Syracuse Nationals owner Danny Biasone came up with the number.

1957 The Pistons got their name from Fred Zollner's factory in Fort Wayne, which made engine pistons. The team moved to Detroit in 1957.

Lakers The Lakers' name makes little sense in Los Angeles. It comes from Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where the team played until moving west in 1960.

23 In January 1960 the Minneapolis Lakers' plane lost its instruments in a snowstorm and landed in an Iowa cornfield. All 23 people on board survived, and months later the team moved to Los Angeles.

1963 In 1963 the Syracuse Nationals moved to Philadelphia. The new name, 76ers, a nod to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, came from a fan in a naming contest.

1964 The 1964 All-Star Game, the first shown on national TV, nearly did not happen: the players threatened to strike unless the owners recognised their union. The owners gave in.

1966 In 1966-67 the Chicago Bulls became the first new pro team to make the playoffs in its very first season. Johnny Kerr, who had never coached before, was named Coach of the Year.

1967 In 1967 Rick Barry jumped from the Warriors to the ABA's Oakland Oaks, coached by his father-in-law. A court made him sit out a whole season.

3 In 1968 jockey Penny Ann Early played for the ABA's Kentucky Colonels. She inbounded the ball once and was taken off. She wore number 3.

1968 The Pittsburgh Pipers won the first ABA title in 1968 and immediately moved to Minnesota. A year later they were back in Pittsburgh, later renamed the Condors.

Jazz Utah's team is called the Jazz because it was founded in New Orleans, the home of jazz, in 1974. The club moved to Salt Lake City in 1979 and kept the name.

1975 In 1975 the ABA's Baltimore Claws played only three preseason games before being thrown out of the league, because the owners ran out of money.

1976 When the ABA folded in 1976, four of its teams joined the NBA: the Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, New York Nets and San Antonio Spurs.

500 In 1976 the owners of the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis folded their team for a share of NBA TV money, forever. In 2014 the league paid them 500 million dollars to end it.

1976 The first slam dunk contest was held at the 1976 ABA All-Star Game in Denver. Julius Erving won it, taking off from the free-throw line.

1978 In 1978 the owners of the Boston Celtics and the Buffalo Braves simply swapped franchises. The new Braves owner moved the team to San Diego, where it became the Clippers.

1979 The NBA added the three-point line in the 1979-80 season. Chris Ford of the Celtics made the first one.

1984 The NBA championship trophy has been named after former commissioner Larry O'Brien since 1984.

1988 In July 1988 the Atlanta Hawks became the first NBA team to play in the Soviet Union, facing the Soviet national team in Tbilisi, Vilnius and Moscow.

3-peat Pat Riley trademarked the word three-peat in 1988, hoping for a third straight Lakers title. It never came, but the phrase later earned him money from other teams' merchandise.

#12 On Valentine's Day 1990 in Orlando, Michael Jordan's number 23 jersey was stolen. He played in a nameless number 12 shirt and scored 49 points.

1990 The first NBA regular-season games outside North America were played in Tokyo in November 1990, between the Phoenix Suns and the Utah Jazz.

1994 Toronto picked the name Raptors in a 1994 fan vote, when dinosaurs were everywhere after the hit film Jurassic Park.

1997 In 1997 the Washington Bullets became the Wizards. Owner Abe Pollin felt the old name was too violent, especially after the murder of his friend, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

23 The Miami Heat retired Michael Jordan's number 23 in 2003, even though he never played a single minute for them.

2006 In 2006 the NBA replaced its leather ball with a synthetic one. Players complained so much that the league went back to leather on 1 January 2007.

51.9 In March 2008 the Hawks and Heat replayed the last 51.9 seconds of a December game, because Shaquille O'Neal had wrongly been given a sixth foul. By then he had been traded to Phoenix.

2020 In 2020 the NBA season was finished inside a bubble at Walt Disney World in Florida, with no fans in the stands.

7.71M The 76ers-Knicks opener of the 2026-27 season averaged 7.71 million US viewers, the most for any primetime NBA opening-night game.

80 The 2026-27 season is the 80th in NBA history.

1967 The ABA's red, white and blue ball was the idea of its first commissioner, George Mikan. He also pushed for the three-pointer and a 30-second shot clock.

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