History & origins
The story of Basketball
Basketball has a birthday and an inventor, which almost no other major sport can claim. James Naismith needed an indoor game to keep restless students busy through a New England winter, nailed a peach basket to a balcony, and wrote thirteen rules. The game spread through the YMCA network almost immediately.
Milestones
11 moments that shaped the modern game.
- 1891
Naismith writes thirteen rules
A physical education instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts nailed peach baskets to the gymnasium balcony rails, ten feet up because that was the height of the rail. Someone had to fetch the ball down after every score.
- 1893
The basket loses its bottom
Open-ended nets and iron hoops replaced peach baskets, and the game stopped pausing after every point.
- 1936
An Olympic sport
Basketball debuted at the Berlin Games, played outdoors on clay and sand courts in the rain. Naismith was in attendance and handed out the medals.
- 1946
The professional league forms
The Basketball Association of America launched in the arenas of eastern cities; a merger three years later with the National Basketball League created the NBA.
- 1950
Integration
Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper and Nat Clifton became the first Black players in the NBA, three years after Jackie Robinson's debut in baseball.
- 1954
The shot clock
Teams had been sitting on leads by simply not shooting. A 24-second limit was introduced, chosen by dividing the game's seconds by the average number of shots, and scoring jumped immediately.
- 1979
Magic, Bird and the television era
Two rookies who had met in a hugely watched college final entered the league in the same year, and their decade-long rivalry turned a struggling competition into a broadcast property.
- 1979
The three-point line arrives
Borrowed from the defunct ABA, the arc was treated for years as a novelty shot. Four decades later it would restructure the entire sport.
- 1992
The Dream Team
Professional players were admitted to the Olympics, and the United States sent Jordan, Magic, Bird and nine others to Barcelona. The tour did more to globalise basketball than any other single event.
- 1997
The WNBA tips off
A professional women's league launched with league-wide backing, and has since become the most durable women's team competition in North America.
- 2015
The three-point revolution
Analytics-driven offences built around Stephen Curry's shooting proved that volume from beyond the arc beat efficiency inside it, and attempts across the sport roughly doubled within a decade.