Hey everyone! Do you like the NBA? And do you know a lot about it? If so, will you be able to score the maximum number of points in this quiz? This is a challenge for you. Will you undertake it? I invite you to the quiz and to read a short text about the NBA.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. It is the premier men’s professional basketball league in the world.
The league was founded in New York City on June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America. It changed its name to the National Basketball Association on August 3, 1949, after merging with the competing National Basketball League. In 1976, the NBA and the American Basketball Association merged, adding four franchises to the NBA. The NBA’s regular season runs from October to April, with each team playing 82 games. The league’s playoff tournament extends into June. As of 2020, NBA players are the world’s best-paid athletes by average annual salary per player.
The NBA is an active member of USA Basketball, which is recognized by the FIBA as the national governing body for basketball in the United States. The league’s several international as well as individual team offices are directed out of its head offices in Midtown Manhattan, while its NBA Entertainment and NBA TV studios are directed out of offices located in Secaucus, New Jersey. In North America, the NBA is the third wealthiest professional sports league after the National Football League and Major League Baseball by revenue and is among the top four in the world.
The Basketball Association of America was founded in 1946 by the owners of the largest hockey arenas in the Northeast and Midwest US and Canada. On November 1, 1946, in Toronto, Canada, the Toronto Huskies faced the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens in what is considered the first-ever NBA game. While the American Basketball League and the NBL already existed at the time, the BAA was the first professional basketball league to intend to play its games primarily in big cities. During the first years of existence, the level of play in BAA did not differ from that of competing leagues or independent teams such as Harlem Globetrotters. For example, the 1948 ABL finalist the Baltimore Bullets moved to the BAA and won the BAA title that same year, and the 1948 NBL champions the Minneapolis Lakers won the BAA Championship in 1949.
On August 3, 1949, BAA officials agreed to a merger with the NBL, creating a new league called the National Basketball Association. The new league had 17 teams, located in a mixture of small and large cities, and playing their matches in large arenas and municipal gymnasiums [6]. In 1950, the NBA was reduced to eleven teams, a process that continued until the 1953-54 season, when the league reached its smallest size ever with nine teams. All of them were located in major cities (New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors (San Francisco), Los Angeles Lakers, Sacramento Royals / Kings, Detroit Pistons, Atlanta Hawks, and Philadelphia Nationals / 76ers). The process of downgrading the league was to take concessions from small towns and move them to big ones. The Hawks moved to Atlanta from the Tri-Cities (an area known as the Quad Cities), in 1951 to Milwaukee, and four years later to Saint Louis, Missouri; The Royals of Rochester, through New York to Cincinnati (in 1957); and the Pistons of Fort Wayne, via Indiana to Detroit (in 1957).
Japanese American Wataru Misaka broke the NBA ethnic barrier while playing for the New York Knicks in 1947/48. This year also saw the addition of the first African American players by several teams, Chuck Cooper by the Celtics, Nathaniel “Sweetwater” Clifton by the Knicks, and Earl Lloyd by the Washington Capitals. During this period, led by George Mikan’s centers, the Minneapolis Lakers won five NBA championships, becoming the League’s First Dynasty. To encourage teams to throw, and to discourage long-haul action, league officials introduced, in 1954, a timer that limited action building to 24 seconds. If the team has missed the shot during this time or the ball has not touched the basket, the clock will restart and the ball will be passed to the opposing team.
The current league organization divides 30 teams into two conferences of three divisions with five teams each. The current divisional alignment was introduced in the 2004–05 season. Reflecting the population distribution of the United States and Canada as a whole, most teams are in the eastern half of the country: 13 teams are in the Eastern Time Zone, nine in the Central, three in the Mountain, and five in the Pacific.
Will you take up the challenge of scoring the maximum number of points in this quiz? Here are twenty questions about the NBA. There is only one correct answer to each question. Are you ready?
