The History of the NBA: From a 1946 Hotel Room to a $76 Billion Global Empire

In June 1946, eleven men sat in the Hotel Commodore on East 42nd Street in Manhattan and signed papers for a basketball league that none of them watched. They were arena owners — Madison Square Garden, the Boston Garden, the Chicago Stadium, the Cleveland Arena — and their problem was straightforward. Hockey filled half the calendar. Boxing and ice shows filled some of what was left. Their buildings sat empty too many nights of the year, and basketball was the cheapest sport they could put on the floor.

What they founded that day, the Basketball Association of America, ran for three seasons before it was even called the NBA. By the time the league wrapped its 2024-25 season nearly eight decades later, it was the centerpiece of a $76 billion media rights agreement with Disney, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video — a deal that roughly triples the prior contract and prices professional basketball as one of the most valuable broadcast properties on Earth.

This is the story of what happened in between. It is told through the league's five commissioners — Maurice Podoloff, Walter Kennedy, Larry O'Brien, David Stern, and Adam Silver — and seven turning points that built the empire: the 1949 BAA-NBL merger, the 24-second shot clock, integration, the 1976 ABA-NBA merger, the televised salvation of the Magic-vs-Bird years, the 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona, and the 2024 media rights deal that priced the league as a global asset. You will meet George Mikan, the bespectacled center who forced the league to widen the lane to stop him. You will meet Bill Russell, who won eleven titles in thirteen years and became the first Black head coach in any major American professional sport. You will meet Larry O'Brien, the federal politician whose name now sits on the championship trophy. And you will see how the league, with each generation, kept finding new reasons not to die.

Before the League Existed: The Long Pre-History (1891–1946)

James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the gymnasium balcony of the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA training school in December 1891 and wrote thirteen rules on a single sheet of paper. The first college game followed in 1892. The first professional game — barnstormers playing for hat money in Trenton, New Jersey — followed in 1896. For the next fifty years, professional basketball in the United States existed as a fragmented sprawl of barnstorming clubs, semi-pro industrial leagues, and short-lived attempts at a national organization.

Three pre-NBA threads matter for the eventual league. The Original Celtics, a New York–based barnstorming club through the 1920s, were the first team to popularize set offensive sets, pivot footwork, and the kind of player-to-team contractual loyalty that pro sports would later codify. The New York Renaissance — the "Rens," founded in 1923 in Harlem — were the first Black-owned, all-Black professional basketball team. They won 88 straight games in 1933, beat the Original Celtics in a celebrated barnstorming series, and were elected as a unit to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1963. And the National Basketball League, the NBL, founded in 1937 by tire-company owners in Akron, Fort Wayne, and Oshkosh, became the first professional league with stable enough finances to survive the war years.

By 1946, three things had converged. The NBL existed but played mostly in small Midwest factory towns. Arena owners in the big eastern cities wanted basketball in their buildings. And the rules of the pro game — no shot clock, no goaltending ban, no three-point line — were producing scores so low (50 to 40 was not unusual) that fans were leaving by the third quarter. The opening was there. Eleven arena owners walked through it.

The BAA Years and the 1949 Merger (1946–1949)

The Basketball Association of America was founded on June 6, 1946 at the Hotel Commodore in New York. The eleven founding franchises were the New York Knickerbockers, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Warriors, Washington Capitols, Providence Steamrollers, Toronto Huskies, Chicago Stags, Detroit Falcons, Cleveland Rebels, Pittsburgh Ironmen, and St. Louis Bombers. Maurice Podoloff, a Yale-educated lawyer who already ran the American Hockey League, was named the BAA's first president. He would run the league, and then the merged NBA, for the next seventeen years.

The first BAA game tipped off on November 1, 1946, at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The Toronto Huskies lost to the New York Knickerbockers 68-66 in front of 7,090 fans, a respectable crowd for a sport with no national television and no household stars. The promotional gimmick that night: any fan taller than the Huskies' tallest player, six-foot-eight George Nostrand, got in free. Joe Fulks, the Philadelphia Warriors forward who pioneered the running jump shot in an era of two-handed set shots, led the BAA in scoring at 23.2 points per game and won the inaugural championship for Philadelphia.

Three of the original eleven franchises folded after the first season. Five more would fold or merge before 1950. The BAA's existential rival, the older NBL, had the better basketball — including a young center named George Mikan, who had led DePaul to the 1945 NIT championship and signed with the Minneapolis Lakers of the NBL. The two leagues raided each other's contracts and bid up player salaries until both were bleeding cash. On August 3, 1949, they merged. The six remaining NBL franchises — Anderson, Denver, Sheboygan, Syracuse, Tri-Cities, and Waterloo — joined the ten surviving BAA teams (four NBL clubs, the Minneapolis Lakers and Rochester Royals among them, had already jumped to the BAA in 1948), the combined seventeen-team entity took the name National Basketball Association, and Maurice Podoloff stayed on as president.

The merger is the first of our seven turning points. Without it, professional basketball in the United States might have survived as a fragmented set of regional leagues. With it, there was a single national entity that could negotiate a single television contract, write a single rulebook, and brand itself as the league.

The Mikan Era and the Birth of the Modern Game (1949–1956)

George Mikan was six-foot-ten, wore round wire-rim glasses on the floor, and won five championships in six years for the Minneapolis Lakers. He averaged 23.1 points and 13.4 rebounds across his career, led the league in scoring three straight times, and was so dominant that the league literally changed its rules to slow him down. The marquee outside Madison Square Garden in 1949 reportedly read: "Tonight — Geo. Mikan vs. Knicks." Mikan was the first basketball superstar built for the wire-service era.

The rules adjusted to him in stages. Goaltending — the practice of a tall center swatting away shots on their downward arc — was outlawed by the NCAA in 1944 because of Mikan's college dominance, and the pro game followed: the BAA barred it from its 1946-47 inaugural season, and the merged NBA kept the ban. In 1951, the NBA widened the free-throw lane from six feet to twelve feet, a change still known to basketball historians as the Mikan rule, to prevent the Lakers center from camping on the block. Mikan, characteristically, learned to score from twelve feet out and won two more titles after the change.

Two other things happened during Mikan's run that mattered more than anything George Mikan himself ever did on a basketball court.

The first was integration. On October 31, 1950, Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitols became the first Black player to appear in an NBA regular-season game. The same week, Chuck Cooper was the first Black player drafted (by the Boston Celtics, in the second round of the 1950 draft), and Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton was the first to sign a guaranteed contract (with the New York Knicks). The three of them, in October 1950, broke the league's color line three years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's. The integration was uneven, slow, and incomplete, but the line broke first, and that mattered.

The second was the shot clock. By the early 1950s, NBA games had gotten so slow — teams holding the ball for minutes at a time to protect leads — that scoring was sinking and ticket sales with it. The infamous low point came on November 22, 1950: Fort Wayne 19, Minneapolis 18, the lowest-scoring game in NBA history. Danny Biasone, the owner of the Syracuse Nationals, did the math one night at his diner in Syracuse and concluded that the average game had about 60 shots per team. He divided 48 minutes of game time (2,880 seconds) by 120 shots and got 24. The 24-second shot clock was installed for the 1954-55 season. Scoring jumped from 79.5 to 93.1 points per team per game in a single year. Biasone's diner napkin saved professional basketball.

This is the second turning point. The third — integration — was happening at the same time, in the same buildings, with the same league. Both reshaped the game in ways no individual player could.

The Russell Dynasty and the First Great Rivalry (1957–1969)

The Boston Celtics drafted Bill Russell with the second overall pick of the 1956 NBA draft. He had been picked by the St. Louis Hawks; Hawks owner Ben Kerner traded him to Boston for Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan, in what is now regarded as one of the most lopsided trades in American professional sports history. Russell did not start playing in November 1956 because he was in Melbourne winning an Olympic gold medal for the United States. When he arrived in Boston in late December, the Celtics were already in playoff position. By June 1957, they had their first championship.

Then they won ten more in the next twelve years. Eleven titles in thirteen seasons (1957, 1959 through 1966, 1968, 1969) is a dynasty without an equivalent in American team sports. Russell never averaged more than 18.9 points per game in a season. He averaged 22.5 rebounds per game across his career — the second-highest career rebounding average in NBA history, behind only Wilt Chamberlain. He won five MVPs, made twelve All-Star teams, and changed how defense was played at every level of the sport.

The Wilt Chamberlain rivalry defined the era. Chamberlain scored 100 points against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962, at Hershey Sports Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania — a game with no television coverage, no surviving footage, and only a radio broadcast preserved by historians. Across 142 career head-to-head meetings, Russell's teams won 85. Their statistical profiles were inverses — Chamberlain averaged 30.1 points and 22.9 rebounds across his career; Russell averaged 15.1 and 22.5 — but Russell's teams won. Both should be discussed with era caveats: tracking data, true shooting percentage, and the kind of defensive metrics now standard did not exist in their playing years. What they did to each other across those 142 nights remains, in our view, the most-watched argument in basketball.

1966 produced the era's most consequential off-court change. Red Auerbach, the Celtics coach who had won eight straight championships, retired from coaching and became the team's general manager. He named Bill Russell, then twenty-nine and still playing, as his replacement. Russell became the first Black head coach in any major American professional sports league. He won two more championships, both as player-coach.

The NBA expanded during the Russell years (Chicago 1961, Seattle and San Diego 1967, Phoenix and Milwaukee 1968) and faced its first existential rival. The American Basketball Association was founded on February 2, 1967, with George Mikan as its first commissioner. The ABA had a red-white-and-blue ball, a 30-second shot clock, a three-point line, and a willingness to sign players the NBA either did not want or could not afford. For nine seasons, the ABA poached talent and ran a parallel circuit. The competition is part of why the NBA's 1970s look the way they do.

The Crisis Decade: The 1970s

The 1970s are the most-skipped decade in NBA history listicles, and the most consequential. Walter Kennedy succeeded Maurice Podoloff as commissioner in 1963 and oversaw the back half of the Russell era and the early expansion. Larry O'Brien, the former Postmaster General of the United States and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, succeeded Kennedy on February 1, 1975. The championship trophy, redesigned by Tiffany & Co. in 1977, has carried O'Brien's name since 1984.

What the league looked like in his eight years as commissioner was a kind of decentralized parity that the modern NBA has never seen again. Eight different teams won championships across the 1970-1979 decade: the New York Knicks (1970 and 1973), the Milwaukee Bucks (1971), the Los Angeles Lakers (1972), the Boston Celtics (1974 and 1976), the Golden State Warriors (1975), the Portland Trail Blazers (1977), the Washington Bullets (1978), and the Seattle SuperSonics (1979). Stars rose and faded: Willis Reed limping out for Game 7 in 1970, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar winning his first ring in Milwaukee in 1971, Walt Frazier and the Knicks running their seven-position offense, Bill Walton's brief and brilliant Portland prime cut short by foot injuries.

The financial picture was bleaker. The ABA-NBA bidding war for talent had driven player salaries up and franchise profits down. Television ratings were soft enough that the 1980 NBA Finals between the Lakers and the Philadelphia 76ers — a Finals that featured a twenty-year-old Magic Johnson playing center for the injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and scoring 42 points in Game 6 — was broadcast on tape delay in several major markets at 11:30 PM after the local news. The league had a perception problem framed by industry press of the era in racial code about player conduct, drug allegations, and lifestyle. Cocaine, in particular, was a real problem and an exaggerated headline.

The decade closed with two structural changes that mattered. The first was the ABA-NBA merger on June 17, 1976. Four ABA franchises — the New York Nets, the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, and the San Antonio Spurs — were absorbed into the NBA. Two surviving ABA franchises, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis, were folded. The Spirits' owners, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, negotiated a perpetual share of the four absorbed teams' national television revenue as part of the deal. The Silna brothers and their families collected an estimated $300 million in television payments before a final settlement in January 2014 — a footnote that quietly tells you how badly the NBA wanted that merger to close.

The second was the three-point line. The ABA had used it for nine seasons. The NBA adopted it for the 1979-80 season, set at 23 feet 9 inches at the top of the arc and 22 feet in the corners. In its first year, NBA teams averaged 2.8 three-point attempts per game and made about 28 percent of them. Nobody in 1980 imagined what would eventually be built on top of that line.

The 1976 merger is the fourth turning point. The three-point line, adopted three years later, is the structural change that the Curry-era Warriors would eventually use to reorder the sport's geometry.

Magic, Bird, and the Save (1979–1988)

The 1979 NCAA championship game, played on March 26, 1979 in Salt Lake City, was Magic Johnson's Michigan State Spartans against Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores. It drew a Nielsen rating of 24.1 and remains the most-watched college basketball game in American television history. Magic was drafted first overall by the Los Angeles Lakers later that summer. Bird, drafted by the Boston Celtics as a junior in the 1978 draft, joined Boston for the 1979-80 season after a redshirt year.

What followed was the league's televised salvation. Eight of the nine NBA Finals from 1980 through 1988 featured the Lakers, the Celtics, or both. Magic and Bird met three times in the Finals (1984, 1985, 1987 — Lakers won two of three). The Showtime Lakers under Pat Riley played the highest-tempo championship-caliber basketball of the era and won five titles in the decade. The Celtics with Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, and Danny Ainge played the most disciplined half-court basketball of the era and won three. The matchups were stylistic opposites — fastbreak versus halfcourt set, glamour versus grit, Hollywood versus Boston — and they aired on NBC and CBS in prime time, not tape delay.

The fifth turning point is here. The league was televisually saved by Magic and Bird as personalities, but it was institutionally saved by the man who took over as commissioner on February 1, 1984.

David Stern had been the NBA's general counsel and then its executive vice president. He inherited a league with an active drug problem, a weak collective bargaining agreement, and a still-uncertain national television deal. In his first eighteen months, he pushed through three things that built the modern league. The first was a strict anti-drug program negotiated into the 1983 collective bargaining agreement, with permanent banishment for hard-drug offenses and a path to reinstatement after treatment. The second was the salary cap, introduced for the 1984-85 season at $3.6 million per team — a mechanism that would force competitive balance and protect franchise economics. The third was NBA Properties — the league's licensing and merchandising arm — which Stern professionalized into a billion-dollar business through the 1980s and 1990s.

Stern's other early decision, less remembered, was global. He licensed NBA broadcasts to overseas television markets at heavily discounted rates through the mid-1980s, betting that distribution today would mean revenue tomorrow. He was right. By the time Michael Jordan returned from his first baseball retirement in 1995, NBA games were broadcast in more than 100 countries.

The Jordan Era — Basketball Goes Global (1988–1998)

Michael Jordan was drafted third overall by the Chicago Bulls in 1984, the same year Stern became commissioner and the same year Nike signed Jordan to a five-year, $2.5 million sneaker deal that the industry has not stopped imitating since. He won his first MVP in 1988, his first championship in 1991. Then he won five more, in two three-peat runs split by a baseball detour: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998. Six Finals, six wins, six Finals MVPs. Across his career he averaged 30.1 points per game — the highest career scoring average in NBA history — and he did it across eras with different rules, different physicality, and different defensive systems.

The Bulls' second three-peat was the most-watched basketball ever played. Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals — Jordan's last shot as a Bull, against Bryon Russell, with 5.2 seconds left — drew 35.89 million U.S. viewers on NBC. As of 2025, it remains the most-watched NBA game in American television history.

The decision that took basketball outside the United States, though, came earlier — at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. FIBA voted in 1989 to allow NBA players to compete in the Olympics. The United States selected what Sports Illustrated called "the greatest collection of basketball talent on the planet": Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler, and the lone college player, Duke's Christian Laettner. The Dream Team won eight games in Barcelona by an average margin of 43.8 points. Opposing players asked for autographs and photographs before the games. Charles Barkley's tournament-leading scoring average was 18.0 points per game — in 23 minutes per game.

This is the sixth turning point. Before Barcelona, basketball was an American sport with international fans. After Barcelona, basketball was a global sport with an American center of gravity. The number of international players in the NBA rose from 23 in 1991-92 to 121 in 2024-25, per the league's annual roster surveys. The Dream Team did that.

The Stern-era expansion completed during the Jordan years. The Charlotte Hornets and Miami Heat joined in 1988, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Orlando Magic in 1989, and the league crossed the border for the first time in 1995 when the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies began play (Vancouver would relocate to Memphis in 2001). The league's 1995-1996 television deal with NBC and Turner was worth $1.75 billion across four years — Stern's largest contract to that point.

The decade closed with a labor crisis. The 1998-99 NBA lockout — the league's third work stoppage but the first to cancel regular-season games — wiped out 32 games per team and pushed the season opener to February 1999. The owners won the main points (a maximum salary structure, escrow tax on overages), but the league entered 2000 with diminished momentum, fewer marquee storylines, and Michael Jordan in his second retirement. The question of what came after Jordan was open.

System Wars and Superteams (1998–2010)

What came after Jordan was, briefly, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles — the Lakers' second great dynasty. Phil Jackson, Jordan's old coach, took the Lakers job in 1999 and won three straight championships in 2000, 2001, and 2002. Shaq averaged 30.0 points and 14.8 rebounds per game across those Finals runs. Bryant, the seventeen-year-old whom the Lakers had acquired in a 1996 draft-day trade with Charlotte, became a primary scorer by his fourth season and a co-equal star by his sixth.

The Lakers' three-peat ran parallel to the San Antonio Spurs' system era, which is in some respects the most sustained run of excellence in NBA history outside of the Russell Celtics. Tim Duncan, drafted first overall by the Spurs in 1997, won five championships across a sixteen-year span (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014). Gregg Popovich, named head coach in December 1996, would coach the Spurs for the next twenty-seven seasons. Tony Parker, drafted in 2001, and Manu Ginobili, drafted in 1999 and signed in 2002, formed the international core that made the Spurs the league's most consistent winner during a period when team-building philosophies were in flux.

2004 was the league's most counter-narrative championship. The Detroit Pistons — Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, Rasheed Wallace, Ben Wallace, coached by Larry Brown — beat the Lakers in five games in the Finals. None of the Pistons' starters averaged 20 points per game that season. The team led the league in defensive rating by a comfortable margin. For a moment, the system-and-defense template looked like the future.

Two off-court moments shaped the late Stern era. The first was the Pacers-Pistons brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills on November 19, 2004, after Ron Artest of the Pacers went into the crowd to fight a fan who had thrown a drink at him. Nine players were suspended for a combined 146 games. The second was the dress code Stern instituted in October 2005, mandating "business casual" attire for players when on team business. Allen Iverson, the league's most prominent guard, publicly criticized the policy as a racial signaling exercise; the debate over what the dress code did and did not say about the league's relationship with hip-hop culture and Black players has not fully resolved.

Globalization continued. Yao Ming was drafted first overall by the Houston Rockets in 2002. His arrival opened Chinese broadcast partnerships that, within five years, made the NBA the most-watched professional sports league in China. Dirk Nowitzki, the German forward drafted in 1998 (by Milwaukee, traded to Dallas), led the Mavericks to their first championship in 2011, beating the Heat in the Finals. Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and the Spurs' international scouting operation rewrote how front offices searched for talent.

The decade's most damaging episode was Tim Donaghy. The veteran referee pleaded guilty in August 2007 to two felony counts related to betting on NBA games he had officiated. The league's response was institutional — a top-to-bottom review of officiating practices, new training programs, an independent monitor — but the underlying trust question lingered. Sports leagues survive on the public belief that the games are real. Donaghy gave skeptics a name to attach to their doubt.

The Analytics Revolution and the Warriors Geometry (2010–2019)

On July 8, 2010, LeBron James announced on a one-hour ESPN television special titled The Decision that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to sign with the Miami Heat. He joined Dwyane Wade, who was already there, and Chris Bosh, who had also signed. The three of them, together, were a deliberate construction of a championship core through free agency — what would soon be called a superteam. The Decision drew 9.95 million viewers on a Thursday night in July. The blowback in Cleveland was immediate and personal (owner Dan Gilbert published an open letter in Comic Sans). The blowback elsewhere was philosophical: what does it do to the league when stars assemble themselves rather than being assembled?

The Heat won championships in 2012 and 2013, losing the Finals in 2011 to Dirk Nowitzki's Mavericks and in 2014 to the Spurs in five games. James returned to Cleveland in the summer of 2014, then delivered the city its first championship in any major professional sport in fifty-two years in June 2016, when the Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 Finals deficit against a 73-win Golden State Warriors team.

David Stern stepped down as commissioner on February 1, 2014, after thirty years in the job. He was succeeded by Adam Silver, his longtime deputy. Silver inherited a league worth roughly twenty times what it had been worth when Stern took over. His first significant decision came two and a half months into his tenure: on April 25, 2014, a recording surfaced of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist remarks. On April 29, Silver banned Sterling from the NBA for life and fined him $2.5 million, the maximum allowed under league bylaws. Sterling sold the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion in August 2014 — at the time the highest sale price for any North American professional sports franchise. Silver had been commissioner for less than three months. He had announced what kind of commissioner he intended to be.

The Golden State Warriors' run is the on-court story of the decade. Stephen Curry won the MVP in 2014-15 and led the Warriors to their first title in forty years. The next season they went 73-9 in the regular season — breaking the 1995-96 Bulls' record — before losing the Finals to Cleveland in seven games. Kevin Durant signed with Golden State in the summer of 2016. The Warriors won titles in 2017 and 2018, lost the 2019 Finals to the Toronto Raptors in six games (Canada's first NBA championship), and ended the decade as the defining team of the analytics era.

The geometry shifted. In 2010-11, NBA teams averaged 18.0 three-point attempts per game. In 2018-19, they averaged 32.0 — a 78 percent increase across eight seasons. Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets general manager from 2007 through 2020, became the public face of Moreyball, the idea that an offense should generate threes, layups, and free throws and almost nothing else. Mid-range scoring fell to historic lows. Pace rose. Possessions sped up. The Warriors did not invent these trends, but they perfected them, and they made them championship-viable in a way no previous analytics-forward team had.

The decade also revisited the labor question. The 2011 lockout cancelled 16 games per team and produced a new collective bargaining agreement that shortened maximum contract length and tightened the luxury tax. By the time the 2017 CBA was negotiated under Silver, the league's economic relationship with its players had moved closer to a partnership than at any prior point — partly through revenue share, partly through Silver's willingness to consult the National Basketball Players Association on issues from playoff seeding to All-Star format.

The Pandemic Pivot and the Global Empire (2020–Present)

The 2019-20 NBA season was suspended on March 11, 2020 after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 minutes before a game in Oklahoma City. The league restarted on July 30, 2020, in a closed campus at Walt Disney World near Orlando — twenty-two teams, no fans, players sequestered in resort hotels, social-justice messaging painted on the courts and stenciled on uniforms in the months following the murder of George Floyd. The Los Angeles Lakers won the championship in October 2020, six games over the Miami Heat — a season that ended with players reading Kobe Bryant's name into the trophy ceremony in remembrance of the helicopter crash that had killed Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others on January 26, 2020.

The 2020-21 season started in December and ended in July, the latest Finals in NBA history. Giannis Antetokounmpo's Milwaukee Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns in six games for Milwaukee's first championship in fifty years. Giannis — Greek-born to Nigerian parents, undrafted out of any American college, signed by the Bucks as a teenager out of the Greek second division — was the first MVP of the new era's globalized superstar archetype.

What has followed reads, in MVP terms, as a near-complete handover. The MVP award, year by year since 2018-19: Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece, 2018-19 and 2019-20), Nikola Jokić (Serbia, 2020-21 and 2021-22), Joel Embiid (Cameroon, 2022-23), Nikola Jokić again (2023-24), and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada, 2024-25). Seven straight MVPs were born outside the United States. The 2023 Denver Nuggets, led by Jokić, won the franchise's first championship. The 2024 Boston Celtics, led by Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, won the franchise's eighteenth — passing the Lakers for the most in NBA history. The 2025 Oklahoma City Thunder, led by Gilgeous-Alexander's mid-range mastery, won the franchise's first championship since their relocation from Seattle in 2008.

The NBA In-Season Tournament, branded as the NBA Cup, launched in November 2023 as the league's attempt to import European football's domestic-cup tradition. The first championship, an in-season tournament final played in Las Vegas, drew strong domestic ratings and is now an annual fixture. The Basketball Africa League, a partnership between the NBA and FIBA, launched in 2021 with twelve teams playing across multiple African cities — the league's most concrete recent step toward formal international expansion.

The seventh turning point landed on July 24, 2024, when the league formally announced its eleven-year media rights agreement with Disney/ESPN, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime Video. The combined value of the deal is approximately $76 billion across the eleven years, beginning with the 2025-26 season. The prior deal, with ESPN and Turner, had been worth approximately $24 billion across nine years. The 2024 deal triples the annual rate. It also moves the league's media presence from cable-only (TNT was dropped) to a streaming-and-broadcast mix that mirrors how its global audience actually watches. The deal prices the NBA, as a media asset, at a level that surpasses every major American sports property except the NFL.

The 2024-25 season — the last under the prior media deal — was the most globally watched NBA season ever measured, with international viewership exceeding U.S. domestic viewership for the first time on a regular-season weekly average, per league disclosures to its broadcast partners. The league's center of gravity, in audience terms, has finally crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The Five Commissioners

The NBA has had five chief executives across its history. The job has changed shape with each one, but each held the same authority: rules-making, discipline, broadcast negotiation, and league expansion.

Commissioner	Tenure	Defining Move
Maurice Podoloff	1946–1963 (17 years)	Closed the 1949 BAA-NBL merger that created the modern NBA. Held the league together through the lean post-war years and through Mikan's dominance.
Walter Kennedy	1963–1975 (12 years)	Expanded from 9 to 18 teams. Fought the ABA's challenge from 1967 onward. Negotiated the league's first significant television contracts.
Larry O'Brien	1975–1984 (9 years)	Closed the 1976 ABA-NBA merger. Brought the three-point line in from the ABA in 1979. The championship trophy carries his name.
David Stern	1984–2014 (30 years)	Introduced the salary cap (1984-85), built NBA Properties, drove global broadcast distribution, oversaw five expansion teams, negotiated five collective bargaining agreements. The architect of the modern empire.
Adam Silver	2014–present	Banned Donald Sterling within days of taking office. Launched the In-Season Tournament. Negotiated the 2024 $76B media deal. Public-facing through the 2020 bubble season and the pandemic restart.

Stern's thirty years are the longest tenure of any commissioner in any of the four major North American sports leagues. The league's enterprise value, measured by total franchise valuation, rose from approximately $400 million when he took office in 1984 to approximately $20 billion when he stepped down in 2014 — a fiftyfold increase across three decades. Adam Silver, more than a decade in, has tracked that trajectory: the league's aggregate franchise value crossed $100 billion in 2024, according to Forbes' annual valuations, with the average franchise worth approximately $4.4 billion.

The Seven Turning Points

The full history is rich, but the inflection points are few. Seven moments separate the league we have from the league that might have been.

1. The 1949 BAA-NBL merger. Without a single national entity, pro basketball might have stayed fragmented like minor-league baseball.
2. The 24-second shot clock (1954-55). Saved the pro game from a slowdown-driven attendance collapse. Scoring rose 17 percent in a single year.
3. Integration (1950). Earl Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Nat Clifton broke the color line in October. The league that emerged was institutionally more equipped to draw on the country's full talent base.
4. The 1976 ABA-NBA merger. Folded the competitor, absorbed four franchises, brought the three-point line in three years later.
5. Magic vs Bird (1979–1988). The personalities saved television viewership. The Stern-era institutional changes — salary cap, anti-drug program, NBA Properties — saved the business.
6. The 1992 Dream Team in Barcelona. Turned an American sport with international fans into a global sport with an American center of gravity. The number of international players in the league grew from 23 in 1991-92 to 121 in 2024-25.
7. The 2024 $76 billion media rights deal. Priced the NBA as a top-tier global broadcast property and pulled the league into the streaming era. Whatever the 2030s look like, they will be built on the financial scaffolding this deal put in place.

Each one was an institutional move, not a player moment. The greatness of Mikan, Russell, Wilt, Magic, Bird, Jordan, Kobe, LeBron, Curry, Giannis, Jokić, and SGA matters — and they would each merit their own dedicated piece in this series. But the league itself was built by the people who built the league. The seven moments above are why an arena-owner consortium from a 1946 hotel ballroom now hosts All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis, plays preseason games in Manila and Paris, and broadcasts the NBA Finals in more than 215 countries and territories.

Where the NBA Goes From Here

Two things make any prediction past 2026 a matter of best-available reasoning rather than analysis. First, the new media deal does not begin to deliver its full revenue until the 2025-26 season — its early impact is still being measured. Second, Adam Silver's commissioner term runs through at least 2030 under the most recent league announcement, and his successor has not been publicly named. Any forward-looking statement should be read with those caveats in front of it.

The directional bets the league has placed are clear enough. The first is Europe. Adam Silver has spoken publicly, most recently in October 2024, about the possibility of an NBA-led European league with stand-alone franchises in cities including Paris, London, Madrid, and Berlin. No formal launch has been announced. The second is Africa. The Basketball Africa League, in its fifth season as of 2025, plays across multiple African host cities and has produced two recent NBA draft selections directly from BAL competition. The third is the WNBA's parallel growth, accelerated by Caitlin Clark's 2024 rookie season and continued through 2025, which the NBA now treats as a strategic priority — not a side project — under the same broadcast and sponsorship umbrella.

The fourth direction is technological. NBA broadcasts on Amazon Prime Video, beginning in 2025-26, will arrive with the kind of personalized-camera and statistical-overlay features that Prime's NFL broadcasts have piloted. Whether the league's audience — which trends younger and more international than any other major American sport — adopts those features at scale will help define the next CBA negotiation, the next round of expansion, and the next collective vision of what an NBA broadcast actually is.

If we have learned anything from eight decades of NBA history, it is that the league finds new reasons to keep going. Eleven arena owners in 1946 wanted to fill empty seats. A diner owner in 1954 wanted scoring to come back. A Yale-educated commissioner in 1949 wanted a single league. A federal politician in 1976 wanted to fold the competitor. A Detroit-born commissioner in 1984 wanted the world. Whatever the next commissioner wants, the structure they inherit is now wide enough and deep enough that the league has, finally, the runway to find out.

Further Reading

Internal reading on the eras, teams, and players this article touches:

• Los Angeles Lakers championship history — Mikan's first dynasty, Showtime, Kobe and Shaq, the 2020 bubble title.
• Boston Celtics championship history — the Russell dynasty, the Bird era, the 2008 Big Three, the 2024 banner.
• Chicago Bulls championships — both Jordan three-peats, with year-by-year breakdowns.
• San Antonio Spurs championships — the Duncan-Popovich system years.
• Golden State Warriors championships — the Curry-era four titles in eight years.
• Bill Russell — eleven titles in thirteen years, the first Black head coach in major American pro sports.
• Michael Jordan — the player who carried the league through its global breakthrough.
• LeBron James — the Decision, the four titles, the longevity that bridges three eras.
• Stephen Curry — the player who rewired the geometry of the modern offense.
• Nikola Jokić — three MVPs and a championship in five years, the center of the league's globalized present.
• Compare legends across eras — side-by-side statistical comparison with era caveats applied.

External primary sources cited in this article:

• NBA.com — the shot clock at 70
• Basketball-Reference — league season-by-season index
• Basketball-Reference — the 1946-47 BAA season
• Britannica — National Basketball Association
• NBA.com — the 2024 media rights announcement
• Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
• Forbes — annual franchise valuations

A closing word on sources: every specific date, score, financial figure, and player statistic in this article was cross-checked against at least two of the primary sources above. Where era caveats apply — pre-1980 stats in particular — the article flags them explicitly rather than carrying modern metrics back across decades that did not generate them. Heritage writing requires that kind of restraint. The game is older than any one of us. Treat it accordingly.