It started in 1946 with 11 teams and 160 players. The shot clock was nearly a decade away, the 3-point line was a couple generations away. Buildings were smaller. So were the players. And it wasn’t even called the National Basketball Association.
The NBA, 75 years ago, was different in almost every imaginable way.
In those earliest of years, teams lost plenty of money. Some of the inaugural franchises only had inaugural seasons, folding after Year 1. There was no robust following and the NBA had little to no impact on societal issues.
“None of us who were playing at that time knew what this would be,” Schectman, who played for the original New York Knicks, said in a 2010 interview, three years before his death. “We didn’t know if this was going to work out and become something.”
Schectman scored the first basket in Basketball Association of America history; it wasn’t called the NBA until three years later, but the NBA counts those years as part of its own. It was an underhand layup for the Knicks in a game at the Toronto Huskies on Nov. 1, 1946, the first two points of 13.7 million in league history and counting.
In time, Schectman got his answer: The NBA, indeed, would become something.
Today, the 30 NBA franchises are worth at least $100 billion combined, possibly much more than that. The league has a fan base that stretches to each corner of the globe and a reputation of being a leader when it comes to social issues.
Like with many things, the early days were the toughest.
The Philadelphia Warriors — now the Golden State Warriors — won the league’s first title in 1947, over the Chicago Stags. By the time the next season started, four of the 11 original teams had folded; the league added a team from Baltimore and played with eight franchises for the second season.
A 60-game schedule was pared down to 48 to save money on travel. Maurice Podoloff, a hockey executive who was the BAA’s first president and ultimately the first NBA commissioner, was tasked with saving the league and winning a battle with the rival National Basketball League for players and attention.
In May 1948, the battle was won. Four teams left the NBL — Indianapolis, Rochester, Fort Wayne and Minneapolis, who had arguably the biggest name in basketball at the time with George Mikan — for the BAA.
“Maurice Podoloff charted the unknown for the NBA,” the late David Stern, who was the NBA commissioner for 30 years, said when Podoloff died. “He took an idea and nurtured professional basketball through its formative years. It is through the efforts of sporting pioneers like Podoloff that the NBA has become an everyday part of the American sporting scene.”
By 1949, the NBA had turned a corner. The league was up to 17 teams, more than doubling what it was. Teams were turning profits. The rebranding to the NBA was complete.