One of two indigenous American sports (volleyball is the other), basketball dates to 1891, the year Young Men's Christian Association instructor James Naismith first hung two peach baskets to the track railing around his gym and encouraged his charges to pitch balls into them. The first professional leagues began operating around the turn of the twentieth century, with the first true national league, the American Basketball League (ABL), established in 1925. A casualty of the Depression, the ABL's demise left the midwestern-based National Basketball League (NBL) as the only major professional basketball league. That monopoly lasted until 1946, when the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was formed by an alliance of arena owners in the major eastern cities. The New York Knickerbockers and the Toronto Huskies played in that league's inaugural game on November 1, 1946.

Despite staging its games in the nation's best venues, like New...