Basketball is one of the most popular and beloved sports in America. Millions of fans tune in to watch the NBA every night. However, it wasn’t always this way. When the NBA first took off in 1946, it never played a single game. In fact, the NBA was actually very different 15 years ago than it is today.
Some days, when the NBA Finals begin and the final buzzer sounds, the television cameras won’t pan across the court to show some camera-hog dawg dribbling around a peach basket with their head down. Instead, they will show a skinny, freckled teenager in an ill-fitting basketball uniform dribbling around a peach basket with his head high and his shoulders proud. The cameras will then pan across to a muscular, hulking, older male in a not-so-trendy basketball uniform dribbling around a white leather basket with his head down.
History of Basketball
Basketball has been around for a long time. It was first invented in 1891 and by 1917 had become the most popular team sport in the world. During the 1930s, basketball was introduced into colleges and universities. During this time, the rules and scoring were changed, and it became faster and more exciting. The first professional basketball league was formed in 1946. Today basketball is the second most popular sport in the U.S. and Canada.
Basketball is one of the most popular and oldest sports in the world, and it’s never failed to make an impression on the American sporting landscape. From its humble origins in the 19th century to the games that take place in the summer, it has grown into a sport that has been played by everyone of all ages and abilities.
Basketball became big more than 100 years ago when a group of Harvard students played a game on the schoolyard. In 1891, a Boston sportswriter named William H. Armstrong, who would later become the first commissioner of the NBA, called the game “Hoops.” By 1892, a team from Springfield, Massachusetts was playing “Hoops,” then the game became “Basket Ball,” and by 1895, the name was shortened to “Basket Ball.” When the game became popular in the 1920s, “Basket Ball” was changed to “Basketball.”
How did Basketball become famous?
In recent times, we can see Basketball becoming a trend in different countries. Any nation that wants to become famous must play Basketball. In comparison to the other U.S. Sports, basketball has always been low-key, but it has slowly evolved into one of the top sports in the country and abroad. In the beginning, boys played basketball, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that girls started playing as well. Soon thereafter, basketball began to grow in popularity, with high school and college teams, men’s and women’s leagues, youth leagues, and more. All of these groups play games all over the country and on the internet. With all the popularity, many companies have found ways to capitalize on it.
Basketball has a reputation of being an easy sport to play, but in truth, it’s quite a complex game to play well. Anyone who plays basketball in a professional setting, be it for a national team or for Broomfield youth basketball organizations (if that is where they live), could confirm that. Basketball is played in a half-court, where the objective is to score points by shooting the basketball through the opening in the backboard. The team that scores the most points wins the game. In order to score, the team must have at least one person who takes the ball and shoots it and at least one person who rebounds the loose ball when the ball goes out of bounds.
In the year 2000, the NBA made a big announcement. The newly formed “basketball alliance” between the NBA and USA Basketball, the governing body for the sport internationally, had a number of ambitious plans for the future of the game. One of the most significant was that the two organizations would work “tirelessly to popularize the game worldwide, including the creation of a worldwide basketball federation.” The federation was envisioned as “an organization to which basketball could be channelled as a sport…”
The history of the NBA can make for a long list of interesting stories, from the National Basketball League’s beginnings in 1946 to its 1972 merger with the American Basketball Association to the decision to make the NBA’s most popular players the faces of the league. The list even includes the rookie minimum salary, which was $1,000 in 1946, and that figure has risen to over $2.5 million per player today.