Basketball was invented in one afternoon by a teacher who needed to keep a class busy indoors, and almost everything since has been an argument about the rules. These stories run from a ten-foot balcony rail in 1891 to a scoring record broken in 2023, by way of a Harlem team from Chicago, an Olympic final played in the mud, and a game the newspapers agreed not to report.
Every tile in a Basketball game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The man who invented the game and then lost at it
On the tile: Naismith1898-1907
Kansas hired James Naismith in 1898 to teach physical education and serve as chaplain, and he coached its basketball team for nine seasons. He had invented the game seven years earlier, but he said it was a game to play that needed no coach, and that wrestling was better exercise. His teams finished 55-60, and he remains the only coach in the program's history with a losing record. He retired from the university in 1937 and died in Lawrence two years later.
Bill Russell won eleven championships in thirteen seasons with the Boston Celtics and was named the league's most valuable player five times. In 1966 the Celtics handed him the clipboard as well, and he coached the team while still playing center for it, the first Black head coach in NBA history. The last two of those eleven titles, in 1968 and 1969, came with Russell on the floor and in charge of the bench at the same time.
George Mikan was so effective near the basket that the rulebooks kept changing to contain him. In 1944 college basketball outlawed goaltending after he and Bob Kurland swatted away so many shots, and in 1951 the NBA widened the free throw lane from six feet to twelve, pushing him farther from the rim. The change was nicknamed the Mikan Rule. Opponents tried stalling too. In 1950 the Fort Wayne Pistons simply held the ball and beat his Lakers 19-18, still the lowest-scoring game in the league's history.
The NBA once barred any player until four years after he had graduated from high school. Wilt Chamberlain left Kansas before his senior year with time to fill, so he signed with the Harlem Globetrotters and toured the United States and Europe with them for a year before the NBA would take him. He joined his hometown Philadelphia Warriors for the 1959-60 season, averaged a record 37.6 points and 27 rebounds as a rookie, and was named rookie of the year and most valuable player in the same season.
Cynthia Cooper was thirty-four when the WNBA played its first season, with ten seasons of professional basketball in Spain and Italy behind her. The league meant to spread talent evenly among its new teams, and its president, Val Ackerman, later admitted, "None of us realized how good Cynthia Cooper was, because if we had, she would not have been assigned to the Comets." Cooper led the league in scoring, won its first two most valuable player awards, and was Finals MVP in each of Houston's four championship runs.
The first player the WNBA signed, months before it played a game, was Sheryl Swoopes. She came with a reputation earned in the 1993 national championship game, where she scored 47 points against Ohio State. In 1995 she had signed a Nike basketball shoe deal, and the Air Swoopes made her the first women's basketball player with a Nike shoe named for her. She went on to win four championships with the Houston Comets and three Olympic gold medals, and was voted the league's most valuable player three times.
John McLendon learned the game at Kansas from the man who invented it, studying under James Naismith while segregation kept him off the varsity team. He spent his career coaching instead. At Tennessee A&I he won three straight NAIA national championships, in 1957, 1958 and 1959, the first college coach to win three national titles in a row. He did not invent the fast break, but his quick, well-conditioned teams helped make it popular.
Tennessee hired Pat Summitt to coach its women's team in 1974, when she was twenty-two and barely older than the players. She won a first national title in 1987 and seven more after it, finishing with 1,098 victories. She had won a silver medal as a player at the 1976 Olympics and coached the United States to gold in 1984. Every player who completed her eligibility under Summitt left Tennessee with a degree.
Hakeem Olajuwon grew up in Lagos keeping goal at soccer and playing handball, and did not take up basketball until the late age of fifteen. Two years later he enrolled at the University of Houston. The goalkeeper's footwork came with him, and he later said his signature move, the Dream Shake, had begun as one of his soccer moves. He won consecutive championships with the Houston Rockets in 1994 and 1995 and was twice voted defensive player of the year.
The Harlem Globetrotters were not from Harlem. They grew out of Chicago's South Side, where Abe Saperstein became coach and promoter for a team of Black players, several of them from a club called the Savoy Big Five. He chose Harlem because it was then the center of Black American culture, and Globetrotters to suggest a team that traveled the world, at a time when it was touring Illinois and Iowa. Their first game was a 48-mile trip west to Hinckley, Illinois. They did not play a game in Harlem itself until the late 1960s.
Bob Douglas had a Black basketball team in New York but no home court, so he made a deal with the owner of the new Renaissance Ballroom and Casino in Harlem: the team could play there if it took the ballroom's name. As the Rens, it won the first World Professional Basketball Tournament in 1939, beating the Oshkosh All-Stars, a white team from the National Basketball League, 34-25 in the final. In 1963 the Hall of Fame enshrined the 1932-33 Rens as a team.
Butler University opened Hinkle Fieldhouse, then called Butler Fieldhouse, in 1928. It seated fifteen thousand people and remained the largest basketball arena in the country until 1950. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Moviegoers have seen it too: the championship scene of the 1986 film Hoosiers was filmed there. A renovation completed in 2014 cost about thirty-six million dollars.
When Penn opened the Palestra in 1927, a professor of Greek, William N. Bates, supplied the name: in ancient Greece a palestra was a rectangular enclosure where young men competed in front of spectators. The arena now seats about nine thousand, and it has hosted more games than any other college arena in history. When Philadelphia's Big 5 began in 1955, its five schools played all their games against one another there, so a building on Penn's campus became home court for the whole city series.
Iowa was one of the few states where girls could play high school basketball in the 1920s, and the game thrived in the state's rural schools. By 1949 the girls' state tournament was a sellout, drawing forty thousand fans to Drake University Fieldhouse in Des Moines. Two years later it went on television, with broadcasts reaching viewers in nine states.
The Lakers were named for Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, after the franchise moved to Minneapolis in 1947. They won six championships in their first seven years, spread across three leagues, and have been called the NBA's first dynasty. In 1960 owner Bob Short, who had watched baseball's Dodgers leave Brooklyn for Los Angeles and thrive there, took his team to the same city. The league urged him to keep the name, and a team from a region with few natural lakes has now been the Lakers far longer than it ever played in Minnesota.
Fred Zollner ran a foundry in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that made pistons for cars, trucks and locomotives. In 1937 his workers asked him to sponsor a basketball team, so he did, and he named it after what the factory produced. The team joined the NBA and stayed in Fort Wayne until 1957, when Zollner decided the city was too small to support it. He took the team to Detroit and kept the name, reasoning that it suited the center of the automobile industry.
Four different buildings in New York have carried the name Madison Square Garden. The first two stood beside Madison Square Park, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street. The third opened in 1925 on Eighth Avenue at 49th Street, and the fourth, the one standing now, opened on February 11, 1968, on top of Pennsylvania Station. So the Knicks play in a Garden named for a square that the Garden left behind in 1925.
The Celtics' parquet floor was not built for the Boston Garden. It was made in 1946 from Tennessee oak, in 264 panels five feet square with the strips in each panel running crosswise to those in its neighbors, and laid first in the Boston Arena before moving to the Garden in 1952. When the Celtics left the Garden in 1995 the floor went with them to the new arena, where it stayed in use until 1999. Its replacement mixed sections of the old floor with new ones.
James Naismith asked the school janitor for two boxes, and the janitor came back with two peach baskets instead. Naismith nailed them to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, one at each end. The rail happened to be ten feet above the floor. The professional game still copies that accident of architecture: the NBA rulebook requires the upper edge of the ring to sit ten feet above the floor and parallel to it.
The first baskets still had their bottoms in them. A man was posted at each end of the balcony to pick the ball out after every score and put it back into play, so the game paused every time anyone made a basket. The college rules did not call for a net with its bottom left open until the 1913-14 season. The NBA rulebook now wants the ball slowed for only an instant: its white cord net, eighteen inches long, must check the ball momentarily as it passes through.
Before 1954 a team with a lead could simply stand and hold the ball, and scoring sank accordingly. Danny Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals, and his general manager Leo Ferris fixed it with arithmetic. A game runs 2,880 seconds, the two teams between them were taking about 120 shots, so each possession got 24 seconds. Scoring rose from 79.5 points a game to 93.1 in the first season played under the clock.
On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored one hundred points for the Philadelphia Warriors in Hershey, Pennsylvania, eighty-five miles from home, in a game the Warriors had taken there to find new fans. It was not televised, and no film of it exists. One Philadelphia radio station carried the game, and a college student in Massachusetts rigged an antenna and taped the fourth quarter. In 2015 that recording was added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. Chamberlain, a notoriously poor free throw shooter, made 28 that night, a record.
The three-point shot was tried in a short-lived league in 1961 and again by the ABA in 1967 before the NBA finally adopted it for the 1979-80 season. Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics is credited with the first one in NBA play, on October 12, 1979, because his was the first game of the season to tip off. The line sits twenty-three feet nine inches from the middle of the basket, and closer in the corners, where the sideline crowds it.
Well into the 1990s, some American high school girls still played basketball six to a side. Three players from each team stayed at one end to score and three stayed at the other to defend, nobody crossed half court, and dribbles were limited. Iowa gave up the game after the 1993 season. Oklahoma held on longer than any other state: from 1987 its schools could choose between six on six and five on five, and only after the 1995 season did they all switch.
The first basketball game began with James Naismith tossing the ball up between two centers at midcourt, a jump ball he borrowed from English rugby. His thirteen written rules never mention it, but until 1937 college basketball restarted play the same way after every basket, so each score was followed by another toss-up at center court. The center jump after every goal was eliminated for the 1937-38 season, and from then on the team that had just been scored on put the ball in play.
College basketball outlawed the dunk in 1967 and did not permit it again until 1976, and high schools banned it over the same years. The rule arrived while Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was at UCLA, and it is sometimes called the Lew Alcindor rule. Others have linked the ban to race, since most of the prominent college dunkers of the day were Black. For nine seasons the most direct shot in the game was a violation.
In the 1961-62 season Oscar Robertson averaged 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists, which is to say he averaged a triple-double across an entire year, and recorded 41 of them along the way. Nobody matched it for more than half a century, until Russell Westbrook did in 2016-17. Robertson's other legacy is legal: as head of the players' association he lent his name to an antitrust suit that reshaped the draft and free agency.
In December 1891 James Naismith had a class of restless students, a gymnasium and a New England winter to get through. He wrote down thirteen rules, split the class into two sides of nine, with three centers, three forwards and three guards each, and had them throw a ball at peach baskets nailed to the balcony. The rules were printed the next month in the Springfield College magazine, The Triangle, and the game left the building from there.
On March 22, 1893, the freshmen and sophomores of Smith College played what is taken to be the first women's college basketball game. Senda Berenson had adapted the rules for them: the court divided into three sections with players held to their own, no snatching the ball out of another player's hands, no more than three dribbles in a row. About eight hundred women filled the hall, men were not allowed in, and the sophomores won 5-4.
Basketball joined the Olympic program in Berlin in 1936, with twenty-three nations entered and every game played outdoors on clay. It rained the day of the final and rained again during it. Dribbling was close to impossible on the soaked court, and the United States beat Canada 19-8, with eight points scored between the two teams in the whole second half. Naismith, then seventy-four, had been sent over by American coaches who raised the money to get him there.
On a Sunday in March 1944, while most of Durham was in church, the basketball team of the North Carolina College for Negroes played a team from Duke's medical school. Under segregation the game was unthinkable, so the players kept it quiet. The Duke men came in borrowed cars, the coach locked the gymnasium doors, and no crowd was let in. John McLendon's team won 88-44, and afterward the two sides mixed their rosters for an informal game together. No newspaper reported it for fifty-two years.
The league that became the NBA opened on November 1, 1946, at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, the first professional basketball game played in Canada. The Huskies lost to the New York Knickerbockers 68-66 in front of 7,090 people. To pull a crowd the Huskies had offered free admission to anyone taller than their tallest player, George Nostrand. Ossie Schectman of the Knicks scored the first basket in the league's history.
Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper and Nat Clifton all reached the NBA in the fall of 1950, and the schedule decided which of them stepped onto the floor first. Lloyd's Washington Capitols opened on October 31 against the Rochester Royals, one day before Cooper played for Boston and four days before Clifton played for New York. Lloyd scored six points and Washington lost 78-70. He had come out of West Virginia State, and two decades later he was coaching in the same league.
7Five starters, and a championship that moved a sport
On the tile: Texas Western1966
On March 19, 1966, Texas Western beat top-ranked Kentucky 72-65 for the national championship at Cole Field House in Maryland. Don Haskins started five Black players, the first time that had been done in a title game, against a Kentucky side that was entirely white. Southern programs that had refused to recruit Black players started to within a season. Between 1966 and 1985 the average number of Black players on a college team rose from 2.9 to 5.7.
8Bird, Magic and college basketball's biggest TV rating
On the tile: Magic and Bird1979
Magic Johnson and Larry Bird faced each other for the first time on March 26, 1979, in the national championship game in Salt Lake City. Michigan State won 75-64. Johnson scored 24 points, and Bird, harried all night, made seven of his twenty-one shots for 19. The broadcast drew a 24.1 Nielsen rating, the highest ever recorded for a college basketball game, and the two of them carried the rivalry into the professional game through the 1980s.
9A scoring record that stood for thirty-eight years
On the tile: LeBron2023
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took over the NBA career scoring lead on April 5, 1984, and left the game with 38,387 points. He held the top spot for thirty-eight years and ten months, longer than anyone in the league's history. LeBron James passed him on February 7, 2023, and did not stop there. By the end of the 2025-26 season his own total had reached 43,440, a little more than five thousand points of daylight over the man he overtook.