suffered a separated shoulder and another was knocked unconscious The boys began tackling kicking and punching in the clinches Naismith said years later They ended up in a free-for-all in the middle of the gym floor This wasn’t at all what Naismith had in mind He wanted to invent a game that could be played indoors during the winter and promote fitness with a low risk of injury to players Naismith would modify the rules most importantly by requiring ball handlers to dribble the ball rather than allowing them to run with it That stopped tackling and slugging Naismith recalled We tried out the game with those rules and we didn’t have one casualty The first public exhibition of the sport was held in the same gym on March 11 1892 A team of students defeated Naismith and a group of teachers by a score of 5 1 In those days someone would have to fetch the ball
out of the basket following each score either from the balcony or with a ladder Men's basketball became an Olympic sport at the 1936 Games in Berlin Germany In the following years peach baskets were replaced by iron hoops and nylon nets and participation would be limited to five players at a time for each team The game spread relatively quickly across the United States and
Canada Before long people were playing overseas in places such as Australia Great Britain and Japan By the early 1900s college basketball was being played from coast to coast in America In the 1920s professional teams in various leagues sprung up across the country Before the end of that decade a pair of successful African-American teams the Harlem Globetrotters and the New York Rens gained fame as barnstorming squads They traveled around the country to compete wherever they could find an audience The sport continued to grow in popularity leading to the formation of two professional leagues The National Basketball League began in 1937 The Basketball Association of America started its first season in 1946 In 1949 the two leagues merged to become the National Basketball Association NBA The NBA took baby steps toward success in the following decades Legendary players such as George Mikan Bill Russell and Wilt
Chamberlain dominated during the league’s early years In the late 1950s the league gave birth to one of the greatest dynasties in sports history in Russell’s Boston Celtics It also survived a challenge by an upstart rival league the American Basketball Association in the 1970s All the while the league continued to grow From 1966 to 1980 the NBA expanded from 10 to 23 teams
