The origin of the NBA: how the league was born from a merger
How the NBA came to be — the founding of the BAA in 1946, its rivalry and merger with the older NBL, and how the modern league took its name and shape.
Basketball before the NBA
Basketball was already decades old before the NBA existed. Professional teams and leagues had come and gone, most notably the National Basketball League, which ran through the industrial towns of the American Midwest. But the sport lacked a single, stable, big-city league to unite it. The story of the NBA's birth is the story of how that fragmented professional landscape finally consolidated into one dominant competition.
The BAA is founded, 1946
In 1946, a group of arena owners in major cities founded the Basketball Association of America. Their advantage was the venues — big arenas in big markets that could draw large crowds. The BAA was not the only professional league, and at first not even the strongest on the court, but its ambition and its access to major cities set it up to become the centre of the professional game.
The merger that created the NBA
The BAA and the older National Basketball League competed for players and audiences until they did the sensible thing and joined forces. In 1949 the two merged, and the combined league took the name we know today: the National Basketball Association. That merger is the moment the modern NBA truly begins — a single league bringing together the best teams and players under one banner for the first time.
From merger to global game
The early NBA was a modest operation compared with the global phenomenon it would become. Over the decades that followed, the league grew, absorbed rivals, expanded across the country and eventually turned basketball into one of the world's most-watched sports. But every part of that story rests on the foundation laid in the 1940s — a big-city league, and the merger that gave the NBA its name and its shape.