How the NBA misrepresents its own history

The NBA is preparing to celebrate its 75th anniversary even though the league did not exist until 1949. What’s going on?

According to official records, the 1946-47 Philadelphia Warriors were the NBA’s first champions. Led by Jumpin’ Joe Fulks, the Warriors defeated the Chicago Stags in five games to claim the title in the team’s debut season. Yet if you had been there in the rush of the Warriors’ joyous celebration and congratulated Fulks or Howie Dallmar — the man whose last-minute shot clinched the championship — for winning the first-ever NBA championship, either man would likely either assume you misspoke or look at you askance and reply, “What are you talking about?”

In the upcoming 2021-22 season, the NBA will be celebrating its 75th anniversary. Already, the league has showcased a new logo it will be using throughout the season and it’s likely that other festivities will be announced as the year progresses. However, the NBA’s actual 75th anniversary remains three years away. Neither Fulks and Dallmar, nor the players on the Baltimore Bullets and the Minneapolis Lakers that won the next two championships would have recognized themselves as NBA champions. Rather, they were all members of a new league called the Basketball Association of America, which would soon merge with the National Basketball League to form the NBA. Yet this history raises a few questions. How did the founding of the BAA come to be seen as the founding of the NBA and why has the memory of the NBL been erased?

Why doesn’t NBA acknowledge the NBL in its official history?

The NBL preceded the BAA by more than a decade. Originally formed in 1935 as the Midwest Basketball Conference, it changed its name two years later when it reorganized as the National Basketball League. However, the vast majority of the league’s franchises remained in Midwestern cities such as Akron, Sheboygan, and Anderson, Indiana. Over the next decade, the NBL slowly became the most prominent professional basketball league in the country. There had been innumerable attempts to create basketball leagues in the decades after the game’s invention, but none of the previous ventures could claim the pedigree, stability, or quality the NBL had attained by the time the BAA arrived.

The NBL was founded by basketball diehards while the BAA was founded by arena owners who saw a basketball league as a good way to fill their arenas on nights when nothing else was booked. It wasn’t hockey, but it would do. This explains why the BAA was able to immediately establish itself in big cities and major arenas such as Madison Square Garden while the NBL was content fielding teams in Fort Wayne and Oshkosh. While men like Walter Brown, the founder of the Celtics, would eventually become passionate supporters of their squads, at the beginning, the BAA was simply a good business idea. It is no surprise that, during the two leagues brief battle for supremacy, the NBL had a reputation for featuring better players.

While the BAA embraced de facto segregation, not featuring a Black player during the league’s three-year tenure, the NBL integrated as early as the 1942-43 season. That year, likely due to player shortages caused by World War II, both the Chicago Studebakers and Toledo Jim White Chevrolets signed a number of Black men, making the NBL one of the earliest professional sports leagues to integrate. In the NBL’s later years, Dolly King, Pop Gates, and Bill Farrow also made appearances. By willfully omitting the history of the NBL, the NBA fails to honor these pioneering athletes who helped strike down the color line before Jackie Robinson first suited up for Brooklyn in 1947.

When talking about that Warriors championship of 1947, the NBA’s website claims that the BAA “absorbed the final teams from the rival National Basketball League.” However, as Curtis Harris has shown, this was not considered an absorption at the time, but a merger that created a new league out of two that could not afford to compete against one another any longer. When the first NBA season tipped off in 1949, there were 17 teams — 6 from the BAA and 10 that had originally been NBL members. Of those 17, just 8 have survived until the present day while 5 of those 8 — the Lakers, Kings, Pistons, Hawks, and 76ers — can trace their origins to the NBL, a league the NBA essentially refuses to acknowledge.

A visit to George Mikan’s Basketball-Reference page quickly reveals the absurdity of the NBA’s strange methodology. It appears there that Mikan’s rookie season was the 1948-49 campaign. It was not. Instead, that was the first year that the Lakers played in the BAA instead of the NBL. Because of the NBA’s acceptance of the BAA’s history and its disavowal of the NBL’s, the two seasons that Mikan played in the NBL, when he won two championships and an MVP, are ignored. Even the Lakers’ official website refers to the “seven seasons” he spent with the team, again disregarding Minneapolis’ title-winning 1948 campaign. The irony is that their championship from the following season is counted as an NBA title even though the NBA did not yet exist when they won it. The way the NBA has rewritten its story over the years is nonsensical and an erasure of crucial basketball history.

So why has the NBA done this? It’s hard to know for sure since the NBA has never officially stated why, since to do so would force them to acknowledge the fact that they’ve rewritten history in the first place. That said, there are a few potential reasons why the league has chosen to prize the BAA over the NBL. The BAA was built around big-market cities while the NBL was much more of a mid-sized operation. Disregarding the NBL also disregards these humble beginnings, making it appear that the NBA was a big deal right from its origins, with teams in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia founded by serious businessmen instead of a scattered regional league that got by on moxie and passion rather than savvy money moves. It also erases company-owned teams like the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets, though Fort Wayne’s Zollner Pistons have survived to the present day. There may be other reasons, but one clear effect of this telling is that it reaffirms the primacy of team owners as the ones who really matter.

Upon looking at the actual facts regarding the NBA’s founding, it becomes clear that the NBA is not celebrating its 75th anniversary this fall. The NBL was the undisputed king of basketball for over a decade and proved that a professional league could succeed, which set the stage for the BAA and eventually the NBA. Several Hall of Famers launched their careers in the NBL and multiple teams can trace their roots back to the days before the league merged with the BAA. When the NBA ignores the NBL, it makes any attempts to memorialize its own past incoherent. Moving forward, the NBA should acknowledge the histories of both the BAA and the NBL while acknowledging their merger as the creation of a new league and not as the absorption of one league by another. Doing so would not only be more accurate, but it would also be a way to belatedly honor the many players and teams that helped spread the game and set the stage for its later triumphs. Their acknowledgment and celebration may be long overdue, but that is no reason to postpone it any further.