The NBA is one of the biggest and most popular basketball leagues today. Even though it’s a US league, it has global recognition and is even supported by sites like online bookmakers Australia. Well, have you ever wondered how the NBA started? We answer this question by talking about the brief history of the league below.
NBA Emerged with The Merger of Two Different Leagues
Between 1930 and 1940, there were two basketball leagues in the United States. The first of these was the National Basketball League (NBL), which was founded in 1937. The other was the Basketball Association of America (BAA), which was founded in 1946. The NBL had more famous players but was having financial problems. BAA, on the other hand, had almost no famous players but had no budget problems. Basketball teams were going back and forth between these two leagues, switching to the higher-paying league each season. The NBL and BAA administrators realised that this rivalry was not going to benefit anyone, and they met on August 3, 1949, to merge the two leagues. The result was The National Basketball Association (NBA).
NBA Designed the Modern Basketball
However, most of the teams did not welcome this change. Between 1950 and 1954, the number of teams (read more at https://hellsbet.com/en-au/woocasino) competing in the league decreased to 8. NBA executives realised that if they did nothing, their newly formed league would disband. Therefore, they first moved teams from small towns to big cities and started playing matches in huge stadiums. They also shortened the attack time to increase the tempo of the matches and introduced new rules such as the “three-point rule”. The result was the fast and dynamic gameplay of today. The NBA merged with another league called ABA (American Basketball Association) in 1967, absorbing all the teams and increasing its number of teams. You know the rest of the story: after merging with ABA, it became the ultimate basketball league in the United States.
