National Basketball Association (NBA)

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the youngest of the four major American sports trade associations, the other three being the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Hockey League. The NBA’s players enjoy the highest average salaries of the four organizations; its arenas attract the highest average crowds; its games are marketed globally; and its business model of expansion and evolution is used in graduate schools as a model of efficiency and planning. The League oversees the operations of 30 teams (29 in the United States; 1 in Canada) that are divided into two conferences, the Eastern and the Western, each with three divisions with five teams each. Teams play an 82 game regular season from mid-October to late April. A grueling sixteen team playoff series, with team seeding based on season records, ultimately brings together the winners of each conference in a best-of-seven championship game in mid-June.

Brief History

Chartered June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America, the NBA was initially established through the efforts of a handful of arena managers and hockey club owners in large urban cities on the East Coast and in the basketball-rich Midwest. The country was experiencing a postwar boom in sports culture, and these entrepreneurs were looking for ways to expand the winter use of their facilities. Basketball had long enjoyed success at the collegiate level, and there had been a scattering of professional basketball leagues that focused largely on rural cities in the Midwest. Despite soon merging with smaller leagues and expanding within a decade to seventeen teams, the association struggled to find a niche until the arrival of DePaul center George Mikan in 1950, the game’s first dominant big man.

The NBA was essentially created later in the decade with the intense rivalry between the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell and the Philadelphia Warriors’ Wilt Chamberlain. The two players would define two widely different approaches to the game, Boston’s team concept and Philadelphia’s reliance on dominant key players. In 1954, to increase the tempo of the game and to prevent teams from holding onto the ball in imitation of collegiate basketball’s controversial four corners offense, the NBA instituted a 24-second shot clock.

By the 1970s, professional basketball’s popularity had stalled. Television ratings sagged, attendance in smaller markets dropped, media coverage was lost to the college game then being dominated by the UCLA juggernaut. In 1967, a rival league, the eleven-team American Basketball Association (ABA), began a vigorous campaign to challenge the NBA’s dominance. Unlike the NBA, the ABA allowed players to be drafted without four years of college, and the ABA paid more. The play was more open and the games were flashier, as the ABA unabashedly marketed the game as entertainment. In 1979, amid the overall decline in basketball viewership, the ABA merged with the NBA after acrimonious litigation centering on player salaries, greatly influencing the direction of the league and of basketball in general. A major change was the NBA's adoption of the three-point shot, which increased scoring and therefore, for many fans, the excitement of the game.

Two other developments in 1979 also helped set the NBA back on a path of growth. Cable channel ESPN began broadcasting games, increasing the league's national visibility. The 1979 draft included two particularly dynamic players, Earvin "Magic" Johnson from Michigan State, who joined the Los Angeles Lakers, and Larry Bird from Indiana State, who joined the Boston Celtics. The two became media icons while helping their teams become dominant forces in the league, and their intense rivalry helped revive interest in NBA basketball.

During the long tenure of commissioner David Stern (1984–2014), the NBA continued to enjoy unparalleled success based largely on a series of celebrity players who each captured the imagination of sports fans. In particular, Michael Jordan, who debuted in 1984 with the Chicago Bulls, emerged as not just a basketball superstar—widely considered the greatest of all time—but a pop culture icon, greatly expanding the popularity of the NBA worldwide. When NBA players were allowed to participate in the Summer Olympics, beginning with the Team USA's Dream Team of 1992 (which included Jordan, Johnson, and Bird, along with other NBA stars) interest in the league further skyrocketed. The league expanded to twenty-five teams in 1988 and twenty-seven in 1989. Two more teams were added in 1995, both in Canada, reflecting the NBA's interest in international growth (although the Vancouver Grizzlies eventually relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, in 2001).

The NBA did suffer a brief drop in fan support and media interest during the contentious half-season that followed a 101-day lockout in 1998. Team owners had attempted to institute a salary cap, which they argued was necessary to protect smaller market teams. The same issue arose again in 2011, and the cancellation of half the season was again met with viewer disaffection. Overall, however, the NBA continued to grow into the twenty-first century. The league expanded to thirty teams in 2004.

Two of the highest-profile star players of the early twenty-first century, Kobe Bryant (who debuted with the Lakers in 1996) and LeBron James (who debuted with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003), were notably drafted directly out of high school. Both were widely hyped as generational prospects and lived up to the billing, helping to fuel steady growth in media coverage of and fan attention to not only NBA competition itself, but also the draft process and other aspects of the league. The NBA, however, perceived that a glut of players with little if any college experience was actually hurting the overall quality of league play. In 2005, the organization adopted a rule that mandated players drafted into the league be at least one year out of high school.

The National Basketball Association Today

In the 2000s, the NBA started playing select preseason and regular season games abroad to reach a wider audience. Games are also often broadcast worldwide. These moves helped basketball steadily earn increasing popularity in many other countries, including China, Russia, and the United Kingdom, with both domestic leagues and international competition gaining strong followings. In turn, a growing number of international players found significant success in the NBA in the 2010s and early 2020s, further boosting the sport's global visibility.

In the United States, despite basketball's continued popularity, viewership ratings have at times still proved volatile. For example, according to the Wall Street Journal, the two main channels that broadcast NBA games—ESPN and TNT—saw 10 and 12 percent drops in viewership, respectively, in 2014. This decline was attributed in part to an overall decline in cable customers and subscribers. Viewership and especially game attendance were also significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020; the 2019–20 NBA season was disrupted and the 2020–21 season was shortened. Nevertheless, basketball remained among the most popular and lucrative of American sports. In 2024, it was announced that the NBA had agreed to a new, eleven-year media rights deal worth approximately $76 billion, reflecting ongoing strong popular demand. By that same year, the average net value of an NBA franchise was reported to $4.4 billion, almost twenty times what it was in 2001.

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