BASKETBALL

Student: Ciomag Mircea Cristian

 Basketball is a simple game played between two
teams of five players each on a rectangular court,
usually indoors. Each team tries to score by tossing
the ball through the opponent’s goal, an elevated
horizontal hoop and net called a basket. The only
major sport strictly of U.S. origin, basketball was
invented by James A. Naismith (1861–1939) on or
about Dec. 1, 1891, at the International Young
Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training School
(now Springfield College), Springfield, Mass., where
Naismith was an instructor in physical education.
 Basketball at the college level developed from a
structured, rigid game in the early days to one that is
often fast-paced and high-scoring. Individual skills
improved markedly, and, although basketball
continued to be regarded as the ultimate team
game, individualistic, one-on-one performers came
to be not only accepted but used as an effective
means of winning games.
 In the early years games were frequently won with
point totals of less than 30, and the game, from the
spectator’s viewpoint, was slow. Once a team
acquired a modest lead, the popular tactic was to
stall the game by passing the ball without trying to
score, in an attempt to run out the clock. The NBC,
seeing the need to discourage such slowdown
tactics, instituted a number of rule changes. In 1932–
33 a line was drawn at midcourt, and the offensive
team was required to advance the ball past it within
10 seconds or lose possession. Five years later, in
1937–38, the centre jump following each field goal or
free throw was eliminated. Instead, the defending
team was permitted to inbound the ball from the out-
of-bounds line underneath the basket.
 The coaching strategy changed appreciably over the years. Frank
W. Keaney, coach at the University of Rhode Island from 1921 to
1948, is credited with introducing the concept of “fast break”
basketball, in which the offensive team rushes the ball upcourt
hoping to get a good shot before the defense can get set. Another
man who contributed to a quicker pace of play, particularly through
the use of the pressure defense, was Adolph Rupp, who became the
University of Kentucky’s coach in 1931 and turned its program into
one of the most storied in basketball history.
 Defensive coaching philosophy, similarly, has undergone change.
Whereas pioneer coaches such as Henry Iba of Oklahoma A&M
University (now Oklahoma State University) or Long Island University’s
Clair Bee taught strictly a man-to-man defense, the zone defense,
developed by Cam Henderson of Marshall University in West Virginia,
later became an integral part of the game.
 Nothing influenced the college game’s growth more than
television, however. The NCAA championship games were
televised nationally from 1963, and by the 1980s all three
major television networks were telecasting intersectional
college games during the November-to-March season.
Rights fees for these games soared from a few million dollars
to well over $50 million by the late 1980s. As for broadcasting
the NCAA finals, a television contract that began in 2003
gave the NCAA an average of $545 million per year for the
television rights. This exponential growth in broadcast fees
reflected the importance of these games to both networks
and advertisers.
 Profits such as these inevitably attract gamblers, and in the
evolution of college basketball the darkest hours have been
related to gambling scandals. But, as the game began to
draw more attention and generate more income, the
pressure to win intensified, resulting in an outbreak of rules
violations, especially with regard to recruitment of star
players.
 BOSTON CELTICS
 Based in Boston, the Celtics are one of the most successful franchises
in sports history, having won 11 of 13 NBA championships from 1957 to
1969 and 17 titles overall.
 Founded in Boston in 1946 by Walter Brown, the Celtics were charter
members of the Basketball Association of America, a forerunner of the
NBA (established in 1949). At the time of the team’s founding, Brown also
managed the Boston Garden, on whose distinctive parquet court the
green-and-white-clad Celtics thrived until the franchise moved to a new
arena, now known as TD Garden, in 1995. The team posted a losing
record in each of its first four seasons, which prompted the hiring of head
coach Red Auerbach in 1950.
 The Celtics’ run as a sports dynasty began in the mid-1950s under
Auerbach, who later served as the team’s general manager and
president. The team won its first title in the 1956–57 season after defeating
the St. Louis Hawks in a closely contested final series, which included a
double-overtime deciding seventh game. With a lineup of Hall of Famers
that included Frank Ramsey, Ed Macauley, Bill Sharman, ball-handling
wizard Bob Cousy, Tom Heinsohn, dominating centre Bill Russell (five
times the league’s Most Valuable Player), and later Sam Jones, K.C.
Jones, and John Havlicek, the “Celts” won eight consecutive NBA titles
between the 1958–59 and 1965–66 seasons—a record for the four major
North American team sports—and triumphed again in 1968 and 1969.

 The Harlem Globetrotters are a predominantly black professional
U.S. basketball team that plays exhibition games all over the
world, drawing crowds as large as 75,000 to see the players’
spectacular ball handling and humorous antics.
 The team was organized in Chicago in 1926 as the all-black
Savoy Big Five. Sports promoter Abe Saperstein acquired the
team soon after and owned it until his death in 1966. In January
1927 the team debuted in Hinckley, Ill., under the name New York
Globetrotters. The name was changed in 1930 to Harlem
Globetrotters to capitalize on the cultural notoriety of one of New
York’s African American neighbourhoods. The barnstorming team
amassed an impressive record over the next decade and in 1939
participated in the first professional basketball championship,
losing to the Harlem Rens in the final game. The next year the
Globetrotters won the tournament.
MEMBERS OF THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS
WARMING UP BEFORE A 2005 GAME
 To help equalize the strength of the teams, the NBA established an annual
college draft permitting each club to select a college senior in inverse order
to the final standings in the previous year’s competition, thus enabling the
lower-standing clubs to select the more talented collegians. In addition, the
game was altered through three radical rule changes in the 1954–55 season:
 1. A team must shoot for a basket within 24 seconds after acquiring
possession of the ball.
 2. A bonus free throw is awarded to a player anytime the opposing team
commits more than six (later five, now four) personal fouls in a quarter or
more than two personal fouls in an overtime period.
 3. Two free throws are granted for any backcourt foul.
 After a struggle to survive, including some large financial losses and several
short-lived franchises, the NBA took its place as the major professional
basketball league in the United States. A rival 11-team American Basketball
Association (ABA), with George Mikan as commissioner, was launched in the
1967–68 season, and a bitter feud developed with the NBA for the top
collegiate talent each season. In 1976 the ABA disbanded, and four of its
teams were taken into the NBA. The NBA grew increasingly popular through
the 1980s. Attendance records were broken in that decade by most of the
franchises, a growth pattern stimulated at least in part by the increased
coverage by cable television.
AMIR JOHNSON WAS THE LAST NBA PLAYER DRAFTED STRAIGHT OUT
OF HIGH SCHOOL. SINCE 2005 PLAYERS MUST BE OUT OF HIGH
SCHOOL FOR AT LEAST ONE YEAR BEFORE BEING DRAFTED.
 Although basketball is traditionally a winter game, the NBA still fills
its arenas and attracts a national television audience in late spring
and early summer. As the popularity of the league grew, player
salaries rose to an annual average of more than $5 million by the
mid-2000s, and some superstars earned more than $20 million
yearly. The NBA has a salary cap that limits (at least theoretically,
as loopholes allow many teams to exceed the cap) the total
amount a team can spend on salaries in any given season.
 In 2001 the NBA launched the National Basketball Development
League (NBDL). The league served as a kind of “farm system” for
the NBA. Through its first 50 years the NBA did not have an official
system of player development or a true minor league system for
bringing up young and inexperienced players such as exists in
Major League Baseball. College basketball has been the area from
which the NBA did the vast majority of its recruiting. By 2000 this
had begun to change somewhat, as players began to be drafted
straight out of high school with increasing frequency. In 2005 the
NBA instituted a rule stipulating that domestic players must be at
least age 19 and have been out of high school for one year to be
eligible for the draft, which in effect required players to spend at
least one year in college or on an international professional team
before coming to the NBA.
 CLEVELAND CAVALIERS
 Based in Cleveland, the Cavaliers have
won one Eastern Conference title (2007).
 The Cavaliers began play as an NBA
expansion team in 1970 under the
ownership of the ambitious entrepreneur
Nick Mileti, who at one time owned not only
the “Cavs” but also baseball’s Cleveland
Indians and the city’s World Hockey
Association franchise (the Cavaliers have
since gone through several changes of
ownership). Coached by Bill Fitch and
playing in the antiquated Cleveland Arena,
the Cavs finished their first season with the
worst record in the league, a frustrating
exercise that was epitomized by John
Warren unwittingly shooting at and scoring
in the opponent’s basket during one game.
The team’s poor season did net them the
first overall selection in the 1971 NBA draft,
which they used to select guard Austin
Carr, the Cavaliers’ first star player.
 NEW YORK KNICKS
 Based in New York City, the Knicks
(which is a shortened version of their
official nickname, Knickerbockers) have
won two NBA championships (1970,
1973) and are among the most lucrative
franchises in professional basketball.
 The team was established in 1946 as part
of the newly founded Basketball
Association of America, which became
the NBA in 1949. The Knicks had winning
records in each of their first nine seasons,
and they advanced to the NBA finals in
three consecutive years (1951–53), losing
each time. The Knicks fielded mediocre
to poor teams the remainder of the
decade and into the early 1960s, but the
team’s fortunes began to change with
the drafting of centre Willis Reed in 1964.