The ENTIRE History of Basketball (1650 BCE - 2026)

The entire history of basketball.

Basketball was invented in 1891, but ball through hoop type stuff predates that by about three and a half millennia. The Mesoamerican ball game, played in what's now Mexico and Central America, going back to at least 1650 BCE. Rubber ball, hip only, you could not use your hands. The ball weighed up to 9 lb, which is how you knew these people were serious.

The stone hoops at the Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza are some of the most famous archaeological features in the hemisphere. And the court is 168 m long, which is roughly one and a half football fields. Getting the ball through the stone ring ended the game on the spot, which almost never happened, because you were trying to ricochet a 9-lb rubber ball with your hip through a vertical stone ring mounted high up on a wall. Ritualistic, cosmological, connected to warfare and human sacrifice. Losers, or captives dressed up as losers, sometimes ended up getting killed. So, you know, slightly more stakes than a pickup game at 24-Hour Fitness.

Dr. James Naismith himself, when he got around to inventing basketball, actually referenced earlier Native American games where you threw a ball at a target mounted on a pole as a precedent. He wasn't creating the idea of a ball going through a goal. Humans have been doing that forever. What he was creating was basketball specifically, and that origin story is very well documented, because he wrote it down.

In December of 1891, at a YMCA. James Naismith, Canadian, born in Ontario, 1861. Physical educator, medical doctor, Presbyterian minister. By 1890, he's teaching at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. His boss is a guy named Luther Gulick. Gulick has a problem, a class of restless young athletes who need to to in shape between football season and baseball season. But, it's a New England winter. It's -6° outside, and the existing indoor options are all boring calisthenics. Two instructors have already tried and failed to invent something. Gulick hands the assignment to Naismith. You have 2 weeks. Invent a game, make it indoor, non-violent, and interesting enough that college-age men will voluntarily play it.

So, Naismith does what any reasonable person does. He thinks about it for 14 days, scribbles 13 rules down on a piece of paper, asks the janitor for some boxes, gets handed two peach baskets instead, and nails them to the gym balcony. He tells the class to split into two teams of nine, throws out a soccer ball, and says, "Go." That first game, December 1891, had the final score of 1 to 0. The goal was scored by a man named William R. Chase. The students were not sold. Frank Mahan, one of the players, famously said afterward, roughly translated from old-timey language, "A rumph, another new game." He also suggested they call it the Naismith game. Naismith said, "No, thanks. Pick literally anything else. A basket and a ball. What if we called it basketball?" Done.

Now, let's talk about the peach baskets for a second. The baskets had bottoms, closed bottoms. So, every time somebody scored, the game had to stop. Somebody had to get a ladder, climb up to the balcony, retrieve the ball, get back down, then they'd keep playing. For years, they did this. Eventually, somebody had the bright idea to punch a hole in the bottom so you could poke the ball out with a stick. Open metal hoops with nets, the thing we actually use now, didn't get standardized until around 1906. That is 15 years of basketball played with a ladder.

Naismith used a soccer ball until 1894, when Spalding finally made one specifically for basketball. For 3 years, it was soccer on the floor. The original 13 rules are a tour. No running with the ball. You had to throw it from where you caught it. So, dribbling literally did not exist. No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking. Three consecutive team fouls equaled a goal for the other team. 15-minute halves. The game ended when the bell rang unless the captains agreed to play until the next goal. You get the picture. It's not exactly finals basketball. Nobody's isolating LeBron at the elbow. This is closer to Quidditch with a soccer ball. But, the bones were there. Score by putting the ball through a hoop you couldn't touch. Defense had to be non-violent. Teams played with a set clock. A bunch of those original 13 rules are still just basketball rules.

And then, the thing went on tour. You would think a sport invented in a random Massachusetts YMCA would take a while to catch on. You would be wrong. It's 1893 now. That's 2 years after the invention. In a single year, a guy named Mel Rideout stages the first European match in Paris. Bob Gateley brings it to China. T. Duncan Patton takes it to India. One of the original 18 Springfield players took the game home to Japan. So, while Naismith is publishing his rules in a YMCA magazine, the YMCA guys around the country are just spreading it globally.

In 1893, the same year Bob Gateley is in China introducing basketball to actual Chinese students, a woman named Senda Berenson at Smith College in Massachusetts stages the first women's college basketball game. So, within 15 months of a soccer ball being thrown at a peach basket, you've got women's basketball, European basketball, and Asian basketball. This was not a slow rollout.

When World War I happens, what does the US Army do? They send over hundreds of physical education instructors along with the soldiers, and those instructors teach basketball to French soldiers, to British soldiers, to Italian and Polish soldiers. Naismith himself actually spent 2 years in France with the YMCA during this period. The Great War was horrific, and one of its stranger side effects is that it functioned as basketball's global distribution deal.

Fast forward to 1936, the Berlin Olympics. 23 nations actually enter the basketball tournament, the largest team sport field at the games. They play it outside on tennis courts in August in Germany. It rains for the final, the court turns to mud, and the USA beats Canada 19 to 8 in what was basically a basketball game played on a beach. James Naismith is there in person, 74 years old, and he personally hands out the gold, silver, and bronze medals. Oh, and the Philippines finishes fifth at the 1936 Olympics in basketball. And that is still, as of today, the best Asian men's Olympic basketball finish in the history of the sport. So, 45 years after invention, basketball is globally established enough to get its own Olympic event. The guy who invented it is still alive to see it happen, and a bunch of Filipinos have already gotten good enough at it to place top five in the world.

This brings us back to America, where a whole bunch of people were trying to figure out how to get paid to play this thing. The first professional basketball league in the United States was called the National Basketball League, and it was founded in 1898. Six teams, mostly Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It lasted 6 years before it folded, which tells you pretty much everything about how early pro basketball was going. For the next 40-ish years, pro basketball in America was this weird barnstorming scene. No real dominant league, just teams crisscrossing the country playing exhibition games against anybody who'd rent them a gym. The original Celtics, not the Boston ones, these were based in New York in the 1920s, traveled up to 150,000 miles a year playing 150 to 200 games against whoever was around. In the 1922-23 season, they went 193-11 and 1. 193 wins.

Then, there were the New York Renaissance, known as the Rens, founded in 1923 by Bob Douglas. The first black-owned, all-black, fully professional basketball team in the history of the sport. In the 1932-33 season, they went 120 and 8, including an 88-game winning streak. That streak has never been matched by any pro basketball team anywhere. Not the Warriors, not the Bulls, not the Lakers. 88 in a row.

And then, there's the Harlem Globetrotters, who were founded in 1926 in Chicago. Abe Saperstein named them the Harlem Globetrotters to evoke black American culture and Globetrotters to suggest they played all over the world. But in the early days, they were basically a barnstorming team from the Midwest that toured Illinois and Iowa. The Globetrotters were also, for a long time, an actual elite basketball team. On February 19th, 1948, they beat the Minneapolis Lakers, who were the defending NBL champions. Then, they did it again the next year. A traveling comedy basketball team beat the professional champs two years in a row. The Rens, the Celtics, the Globetrotters, this is what pro basketball in America was before there was a proper league, which there was about to be.

Because in 1946, a bunch of rich guys who owned hockey arenas decided they had a problem. The Basketball Association of America, founded on June 6th, 1946, not by basketball people, by hockey people. Specifically, by the owners of major hockey arenas who were looking at all these empty dates on their calendars and going, "Yeah, we could probably put bodies in seats with a basketball game." The president of the BAA, a guy named Maurice Podoloff, was simultaneously running the American Hockey League. That is the level of dedicated basketball expertise we were starting with here. The first game was on November 1st, 1946. The New York Knickerbockers against the Toronto Huskies, Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The final score was 68-66 New York. A guy named Ossie Schectman scores the first basket in league history. Three years later, the BAA merges with the old National Basketball League, and together they become the NBA.

The first real superstar of pro basketball is a 6'10" center with Coke bottle glasses named George Mikan. The Minneapolis Lakers sign him out of DePaul. He can't really jump, and he can't really shoot past 5 ft, but he is enormous for the era, and he has a devastating hook shot. The Lakers win five titles in the first six years of the league. Mikan averages 23 points a game in an era where the team average was in the low 80s, meaning he was scoring over a quarter of Minneapolis's offense by himself. He was so dominant that 1951, the NBA literally widened the free throw lane just to get him further from the basket, from 6 ft wide to 12 ft wide. The first rule change in league history designed specifically to limit one player, which is the sort of compliment you don't usually get to receive about your own work.

But all of that dominance couldn't hide the fact that the league was broken. November 22nd, 1950. The Fort Wayne Pistons play the Minneapolis Lakers. The Pistons walk in knowing they can't outscore Mikan's team. So, they just hold the ball on purpose for the entire game. The final score is 19 to 18. Fort Wayne wins, which is the lowest scoring NBA game in history and also the moment the entire league starts to realize it has a problem. Imagine paying money to watch that. Imagine buying a ticket, getting yourself to the arena, and watching Mikan and his fellow giants stand around for 2 hours while a guy dribbles in a circle. People stopped coming. Ratings tanked. By 1954, the NBA was basically a dead sport walking.

Enter a guy named Danny Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals. Biasone sits down with his GM Leo Ferris and does some math. A basketball game is 48 minutes, which is 2,880 seconds. A good game, he figured, was one where each team took about 60 shots. So, 120 shots total. 2,880 / 120 is 24. So, what if every time you touch the ball, you had 24 seconds to shoot it? If you don't, you lose possession. Done. The NBA adopts the 24-second shot clock for the 1954-55 season. Biasone's Syracuse Nationals win the title that year. Scoring explodes, arenas fill back up, and one guy with a napkin and some basic division saves professional basketball in America.

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Fast forward to the early 60s. A skinny shot-blocking center out of the University of San Francisco named Bill Russell gets drafted second overall by the Hawks in 1956, traded to the Boston Celtics before he even signs, and then wins an Olympic gold medal in Melbourne later that year just to warm up. Their head coach is a guy named Red Auerbach. He was apparently some kind of basketball wizard because what happens over the next 13 years is something that will never happen again in any sport. 11 championships in 13 seasons. 11 rings in 13 years. The only two years Russell didn't win a ring were the year he got injured in the finals and one other. He won five MVPs along the way. And in 1966, the Celtics hired him as a player-coach, making him the first black head coach in the history of any major American professional sport. He then won two more rings while simultaneously playing center and coaching the team.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, there's a dude named Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt was the opposite of Russell in literally every basketball way. Where Russell was 6'10" and skinny and focused on defense and team play, Wilt was 7'1", the strongest player in the league by a wide margin, a phenomenal athlete who could throw down dunks like nobody else alive. He averaged 50.4 points a game one season. He also averaged 25.7 rebounds that same year and played 48 and a half minutes a game, which if you're doing the math, is more than regulation. He was on the court for overtime in basically every game. On March 2nd, 1962, Wilt scored 100 points in a single NBA game in Hershey, Pennsylvania. 36 for 63 from the field, 28 for 32 from the free throw line. There is no video footage. None. The game wasn't even televised. The only official record is the box score, some photos, a radio call, and memories. The single greatest individual offensive performance in league history happened and the only people who saw it live were the maybe 4,000 fans at Hershey Park Arena. Wilt grabbed 55 rebounds in a single game. He's the all-time NBA rebounds leader, 23,924 of them. He won seven scoring titles in a row and four MVPs.

So, if you're doing the tape, Russell was smaller, less talented, less athletic, and more injured for most of his career. Why does he have 11 rings and Wilt has two? Because the playoffs weren't about who was better. They were about who won. And Russell's Celtics beat Wilt's teams in seven out of their eight playoff series. The guy with the better stats lost. The guy with the better team won. Wilt eventually won rings, one in 1967 with the Sixers, ending Boston's string, and one in 1972 with the Lakers. But when Wilt came into Russell's living room, Russell usually figured out how to kick him back out. This, by the way, is how the whole ring counting thing in basketball got started because Bill Russell won 11 of them. And now every conversation about every superstar since has been, at some point, about whether they got enough rings. You want to blame somebody for the takes on LeBron? blame Russell. He set the bar.

The 1960s end, Russell retires, the NBA starts to sag a little because this is what happens when your entire identity revolves around one dynasty. Meanwhile, over in a parallel league, things are getting weird. The American Basketball Association, founded in 1967, the ABA had a red, white, and blue ball, which looks ridiculous in retrospect and also kind of incredible. They invented the three-point line. They invented the slam dunk contest at the 1976 All-Star game. They had Julius Erving, Dr. J, the man who made the dunk look cool. They had George Gervin, Dan Issel, Connie Hawkins, Moses Malone, Artis Gilmore, a genuinely elite collection of basketball talent, most of whom the NBA didn't want because the NBA was still the conservative established league. The ABA lasted nine seasons. It also constantly lost money and was constantly on the brink of collapse. And eventually, in 1976, the two leagues merged. Four ABA teams were absorbed into the NBA. The Nets, the Nuggets, the Pacers, and the Spurs. The Kentucky Colonels took a $3 million buyout to go away.

And then, there was the Spirits of St. Louis. The Spirits were owned by two brothers, Ozzie and Daniel Silna. When the merger happened, the Silnas were not absorbed into the NBA. But instead of taking a lump sum buyout like the Colonels did, the Silnas took a different offer, a completely bananas one. They said, "We'll fold the Spirits, and in exchange, we want 1/7 of the four merging teams' share of national TV revenue forever, in perpetuity, until the end of time." The NBA looked at that offer. They looked at their TV deal, which at the time was worth roughly the cost of a medium pizza, and they said, "Sure, sounds fine." The checks started small, then cable happened, then Magic and Bird happened, then Jordan happened, then Yao happened, then LeBron happened. By 2012, the Sielnas were making about 14 and 1/2 million dollars a year, every year, off a basketball team that hadn't existed in almost 40 years. The NBA finally got tired of it in 2014 and wrote them a 500 million dollar check to reduce the payments. The total estimated take across the lifetime of the deal, something like 800 million dollars for two guys for a team that folded in 1976. If you've ever wondered why lawyers are expensive, that's why. One set of lawyers didn't read their TV deal carefully enough, and it cost the NBA most of a billion dollars over four decades.

Meanwhile, on the court, the '70s are running. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gets drafted in 1969, wins a ring in Milwaukee, and then gets traded to the Lakers in 1975. His skyhook is unguardable. Oscar Robertson averages a triple-double for an entire season in 1961-62, 30 points, 12 rebounds, 11 assists, a record that will stand until Russell Westbrook does it 55 years later. Jerry West averages a triple-double in the 1969 finals and becomes the only player ever to win Finals MVP while losing the series. But nobody watched any of it. The 1980 NBA finals, the Lakers and the Sixers with rookie Magic Johnson against Dr. J were tape-delayed by CBS. As in, the finals were not on live. They aired it 11:30 p.m. Eastern after The Dukes of Hazzard. Imagine the championship of the sport on a rerun. Four of the six 1981 finals games were also tape-delayed. The LA Times published a report that summer saying somewhere between 40 and 75% of NBA players were using cocaine. Ratings were in the toilet. The league was a mess.

Lucky for everybody, two college kids had just played the most watched college basketball game of all time. March 26th, 1979, the NCAA Championship game. Michigan State versus Indiana State, Salt Lake City. Michigan State's best player is a 6'9" point guard. A point guard who is 6'9" named Earvin Magic Johnson. Indiana State's best player is a 6'9" forward who can pass like a point guard named Larry Bird. Both of them are about to get drafted into the NBA. Michigan State wins 75-64. Magic's the most outstanding player. Bird drops 19 and 13, but shoots 7 for 21 against a suffocating box-and-one defense. The Nielsen rating was 24.1, which is still, as of today, the highest-rated college basketball game ever broadcast in the United States. About 40 million people watched. It's not an exaggeration to say that rating is what told the NBA's TV partners there's an audience for this. They just need to see these two guys.

Magic goes number one to the Lakers. Bird goes to the Celtics, who had actually drafted him a year earlier and then sat on his rights for a year because the rules at the time let them. Bird wins Rookie of the Year that first season. Magic wins something better. Magic wins a ring his first year and caps it off with one of the most absurd Finals performances anybody's ever put up. Game six of the 1980 Finals, Kareem has sprained his ankle and can't play. So, the Lakers go to Magic, a 20-year-old rookie point guard, and start him at center. He puts up 42 points, 15 rebounds, and seven assists. He wins Finals MVP as a rookie at center in the Finals. Magic is the only rookie to ever win a Finals MVP because, of course he is, because the basketball gods weren't going to write a better origin story than that.

Over the 1980s, Magic wins five rings with the Lakers, three MVPs, three Finals MVPs. He's the best passer alive and possibly the best passer who has ever lived. Bird wins three rings with the Celtics and wins three consecutive MVPs from 1984 through 1986, which is still one of the most dominant regular season runs in league history. They meet in the Finals three times. 1984, Boston wins it in seven. 1985, Lakers take revenge in six. And then 1987, the Lakers win again in six with Magic hitting what he called the junior junior sky hook to win game four. Every single one of these Finals is on live TV. Every one of them is pulling big ratings. By the end of the '80s, Magic and Bird have basically dragged the NBA out of tape delay purgatory and into the mainstream. They were also conveniently a college basketball rivalry in pro form. White guy from Indiana versus black guy from Michigan. Celtics versus Lakers. Old money versus new. Every network executive in America looked at that and saw dollar signs, which is not me endorsing the framing, but it is the truth.

And then, as the '80s are ending, the bad boy Pistons show up. Isaiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Dennis Rodman, Joe Dumars, they play basketball like it's a hockey game. They win back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990. And they invent something called the Jordan rules, which is a defensive scheme specifically designed to break a young kid from North Carolina who keeps trying to beat them. His name is Michael. You know this part. Everybody knows this part. So, I'll try to make it quick.

Michael Jordan, drafted third overall in 1984, meaning two teams passed on him. The Rockets took Olajuwon, which is defensible, and the Blazers took Sam Bowie, which is not defensible. Rookie of the year and All-Star as a rookie, but for his first six pro seasons, the Pistons knock him out of the playoffs three years in a row from 1988 to 1990. Pat Riley's Lakers, Detroit's Pistons, Jordan's weren't there yet. 1991, they finally break through. They beat the Pistons. The Pistons famously walk off the court without shaking hands. Bulls go to the finals against Magic's Lakers. Jordan beats his hero 4-1. Then, '92, '93, [music] they won three straight rings, the first three-peat of a career that'll have two.

In July 1993, Jordan's father, James Jordan, is murdered in North Carolina. In October, Jordan announces he's retiring from basketball at the absolute peak of his career at age 30 with three rings in a row to go play minor league baseball for the Birmingham Barons. He plays baseball for about a year. He hits .202. He's a mediocre Double-A outfielder, but by every account of the people who saw him day in and day out, he was getting better. Then, the MLB players go on strike in 1994, and Jordan decides he's not going to be a scab. He goes back to basketball. On March 18th, 1995, he issues a two-word press release, "I'm back." He comes back wearing number 45. They lose in the second round of the playoffs, so he switches back to 23 for the next season, and the Bulls go 72 and 10 in 1995-96. 72 regular season wins, the most ever at the time. Jordan averages 30.4 points and wins MVP. They steamroll the Sonics in the finals, and he wins finals MVP for the fourth time. Three-peat number two starts there. Then they win again in '97 and in '98.

In game five of the 1997 finals against Utah, Jordan is so sick he can barely stand up. Later reporting said it was more likely food poisoning than the flu, but the pizza game doesn't sound as cool, so they called it the flu game. He scores 38 points, hits the go-ahead three with 25 seconds left, and collapses into Scottie Pippen's arms walking off the court. Bulls win. Game six of the 1998 finals, it's Utah again. The Bulls are down one with 20 seconds left. Jordan strips Karl Malone in the post, dribbles up the floor, hits Bryan Russell with a slight push-off, and buries the jumper from the top of the key with 5.2 seconds left. Bulls win 87-86. That's the shot. That's the end. Six finals, six rings, six finals MVPs. Six and 0 when it mattered. The NBA has had amazing players before Jordan and amazing players since, but nobody else has that record. Undefeated in the finals, unanimously considered the best player of his generation. Every single person who played basketball anywhere in the world from 1989 until about 2003 wanted to be Michael Jordan. That mattered a lot because basketball was about to go global.

It's Monte Carlo, 1992. Behind closed doors at a Mediterranean resort, there's no cameras, no press, 10 of the greatest basketball players ever assembled are running a pickup scrimmage to shake off the rust before the Olympics. And they split into two teams, Magic versus Michael. Magic's team gets up 14 to two early. Jordan, competitive to his bones, turns into an animal. His team comes back and wins. Magic is yelling at Jordan. Jordan is talking trash. Barkley is losing his mind on the sideline. Chuck Daly, the head coach, later said it was the single best basketball he ever saw played. And nobody outside that gym has ever watched a second of it.

The Dream Team assembled for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullin, David Robinson, and Christian Laettner, the one college kid who mostly sat and looked nervous. And then there was the head coach, Chuck Daly, who famously never called a single timeout for the entire tournament. They existed because in April of 1989, FIBA, the International Basketball Federation, held a vote in Munich and decided 56 to 13 that NBA pros would be allowed to play in FIBA events, including the Olympics. Until that vote, the Americans had to send college kids to the games, which is how the Soviet Union had beaten them in 1988 Seoul to take the gold. The world wanted the American pros. The world was about to get exactly what they asked for. The 1992 Olympic team won every game by an average of about 44 points. They beat Croatia 117 to 85 in the gold medal game, and that was the closest game they played. They never called a timeout. The opposing teams asked for autographs. The other Olympians lined up for photos, but the real impact wasn't on the scoreboard. The real impact was that somewhere in Germany, a 14-year-old Dirk Nowitzki was watching the Dream Team on TV. In Argentina, 14-year-old Manu Ginobili was watching. In China, 12-year-old Yao Ming was watching. Every global basketball star of the last 30 years, without exception, has in some way pointed to the Dream Team as a reason they're in the NBA. That is the one tournament that changed the direction of the entire sport. The decision to send the pros abroad didn't just show the world that American basketball was better. It told a whole generation of kids in a dozen other countries that basketball was what you wanted to do with your life.

But before we get to what that next generation did, we have to talk about the guy who didn't make it. In Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, there was a basketball team that was probably the second best team in the world. They won EuroBasket in 1989 and 1991 and the FIBA World Championship in 1990. The roster included Dražen Petrović, a Croatian guard who was turning into one of the most feared shooters of the early 90s NBA. Vlade Divac, a Serbian center who would eventually become an NBA All-Star. Toni Kukoč, the Croatian forward who Bulls fans know. And then, Yugoslavia fell apart. In 1990, right after Yugoslavia won the FIBA World Championship in Argentina, a fan ran onto the court with a Croatian flag. Divac grabbed the flag and threw it aside. To him, it was a Yugoslav victory, not a Croatian one. To Petrovic, it was a betrayal. Croatia declared independence. The Yugoslav war started. Petrovic and Divac never spoke again. Petrovic went to the NBA. He played for Portland and then New Jersey. He made all-NBA third team in 1993 at age 28, a genuine top-tier scorer in the league. On June 7th, 1993, he was a passenger in a car on the A9 Autobahn in Germany. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt and it was raining. The car hit a truck and he was killed on the spot. Vlade Divac has said in pretty much every interview he's given in the 30-plus years since that one of his great regrets is that he never reconciled with Petrovic before he died. ESPN made a 30 for 30 about it called Once Brothers. It will ruin your afternoon, but you should watch it anyway.

Here's the quick tour of what the Dream Team inspired generation did when they grew up. Dirk Nowitzki, from 1998 to 2019, he was with the Dallas Mavericks. 31,560 career points, still the most by any European-born player. He was the 2007 MVP, the first European to win it. The 2011 Finals MVP, where he ran a LeBron-era Heat team off the court in six games, averaging 26 a night and going for 21 and 11 in the clincher. The reason he shot a fadeaway on one leg for 20 years is because he trained with a German guy who taught him geometry-based basketball.

Yao Ming from China, listed at 7'6". Both of his parents were professional basketball players. His dad was 6'7", his mom was 6'3". Yao weighed 11 lb at birth, which, if you're not a parent, that is enormous. The Chinese had genetically locked into a center the size of a mid-sized SUV, and they weren't letting him out of the country easy. The Rockets took him first overall in 2002. And when Yao played, the game got broadcast in China to audiences in the hundreds of millions. One specific Rockets-Bucks game drew over 200 million Chinese viewers, more than the Super Bowl. Yao's feet could not take his weight across a pro career, and he retired in 2011 at 30. He was an eight-time All-Star, a Hall of Famer.

Manu Ginobili from Argentina, picked 57th overall in 1999. 57th out of 58. Four championships with the Spurs, Hall of Fame. Before he joined the NBA, he led Argentina at the 2002 FIBA World Championship in Indianapolis. And in the group stage, his team of mostly EuroLeague and Argentine League guys beat Team USA 87-80. That was the first loss ever by a US team that contained NBA players. Two years later in the 2004 Athens Olympics, Argentina won gold. They beat Team USA in the semifinals. Yes, the same Team USA that had Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Carmelo Anthony on it. Argentina, a country of 45 million people, won Olympic gold in basketball against the US at full strength.

Then there was Tony Parker from France, the 28th pick in 2001. He won four rings with the Spurs, the first European-born player to win Finals MVP in 2007. There was Pau Gasol from Spain. He won two rings with Kobe's Lakers. The list goes on and on. The Dream Team opened a door in 1992, and a whole planet walked through it. Seven straight NBA MVPs now, Giannis, Giannis, Jokic, Jokic, Embiid, Jokic, and then Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in 2025, who is Canadian. And it looks like he's going to win again. None of them, not one of them, were born in the United States. None of them grew up watching American high school basketball. The NBA has become the world's best basketball league by becoming a league with players from the entire world.

And then, on top of all that, basketball itself started changing. Oh, but first, one more Laker, Kobe Bryant. Drafted 13th overall in 1996 straight out of Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania because he decided at 17 to skip college. He played 20 seasons, all of them with the Lakers. He won five championships, three with Shaquille O'Neal from 2000 through 2002, and then two more on his own in 2009 and 2010. He won two Finals MVPs and one regular season MVP in 2008, 18 All-Star games. On June 22nd, 2006, in a regular season game against the Toronto Raptors, Kobe scored 81 points, 81. He outscored the entire Toronto team through three quarters. The only guy in NBA history who scored more in a single game is Wilt Chamberlain. Well, until Bam Adebayo dropped 83 this year. Kobe was also, and this matters here, probably the most globally dominant NBA brand between Jordan's retirement and LeBron's prime. Chinese kids who didn't care about Yao cared about Kobe. Argentines who grew up watching Manu also wore Kobe jerseys. He was who every teenager in every country tried to crossover like. Kobe played his final NBA game on April 13th, 2016. He scored 60 points because, of course he did.

It's 2004. The NBA bans hand-checking. Until then, defenders could put a hand or forearm on the ball handler's hip above the free throw line. After 2004, that's a foul. League-wide scoring jumps about four points a game that year and just keeps climbing. Then, a few years later, a Rockets GM named Daryl Morey looks at the math. A 40% three-point shooter makes 1.2 points per shot. A 48% two-point shooter makes 0.96. So, shoot the three every time. Always the three. Attack the rim, kick out for a three, shoot a three, take a foul and shoot free throws. Everything in between is mathematically inefficient. The Rockets start running this offense in the late 2000s. Everyone calls it stupid. Everyone calls it boring. Then, the Lakers start playing like this in 2014 and they win a championship in 2015. Then, they go 73 and 9 in 2015-2016, breaking the Bulls single-season record from 20 years earlier. And Steph Curry wins the first unanimous MVP in NBA history. Curry, by the way, was the seventh pick in the 2009 NBA draft. Teams passed on him because they thought he was too small and couldn't guard anybody in the pros. Blake Griffin went first, then Hasheem Thabeet, then James Harden, Tyreke Evans, Ricky Rubio, and Jonny Flynn. Steph is now the greatest shooter in the history of the sport and the man who single-handedly rewired how every kid under 20 plays basketball. On December 14th, 2021, Curry passed Ray Allen's career three-point record. Allen had 2,973 threes across 18 seasons. Curry hits his on a step-back at Madison Square Garden. Allen had held that record for nearly a decade. Curry's had it ever since and he's about a thousand threes ahead of anybody still active.

Meanwhile, the story of the 2010s is essentially the LeBron James story. Number one pick in 2003 to Cleveland, makes the finals in year four, loses, decides in 2010 to take my talents to South Beach on a televised ESPN special that literally everybody in America hated him for. But then he wins two rings in Miami and loses two other finals. He goes back to Cleveland in 2014. In 2016, down 3-1 in the finals to that same 73-9 Warriors team, he leads the first ever 3-1 finals comeback in NBA history. He averages 30, 11, 9, 3, and 2 across the series. The only player ever to lead a final series in points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks. He blocks Andre Iguodala at the rim with 2 minutes left in game seven. Kyrie Irving hits the go-ahead three over Curry with 53 seconds left, and Cleveland wins its first professional sports championship in 52 years. LeBron then goes to the Lakers in 2018, wins another ring in the 2020 bubble, and on February 7th, 2023, at age 38, he hits a fadeaway jumper from the left elbow with a few seconds left in the third quarter against the Oklahoma City Thunder to become the all-time leading scorer in NBA history. Point number 38,388, passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a record that had stood since 1984, or roughly a decade before half the NBA was born.

And then, as LeBron slowly winds down, the league keeps rolling. Giannis leads the Bucks to a 2021 championship. Curry finally gets a Finals MVP in 2022. Jokic wins in 2023. The Celtics win banner 18 in 2024. And in 2025, the Oklahoma City Thunder, of all teams, who most recently won a title as the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979, win the whole thing, beating the Pacers in seven games behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who wins regular season MVP and Finals MVP in the same year. He's Canadian, which is probably exactly the kind of thing Naismith would have loved.

One more thing, because basketball's history is not just the guys. Senda Berenson, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. On March 22nd, 1893, she stages what's generally recognized as the first women's college basketball game. This is 16 months after Naismith. Basketball existed for women almost as long as it existed for men. For the next 80-something years, women's basketball exists in amateur circuits and colleges, mostly invisible. Then, 1976, the Olympics add women's basketball. The Soviet Union wins gold. The US takes silver. In 1996, the NBA finally approves a women's pro league. The WNBA tips off in 1997. The Houston Comets win the first four championships in a row, led by Cynthia Cooper and Sheryl Swoopes. And then, 2024. Caitlin Clark, University of Iowa guard, can shoot from anywhere past half court. On March 3rd, 2024, she breaks the all-time NCAA Division I scoring record for any player of any gender, passing Pete Maravich's 3,667 points that had stood since 1970. She finishes with 3,951. A month later, the women's NCAA final game gets 18.9 million TV viewers, which is more than the men's. Clark goes first overall in the WNBA draft to the Indiana Fever. Between her and A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, the WNBA goes from league that just tries to survive to a league selling out arenas and winning over cities that previously had no relationship with women's basketball. The same thing Magic and Bird did to the NBA in 1979, Clark did to the WNBA in 2024.

So, that's where we are. 2026, 135 years after Dr. James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to a balcony at a Massachusetts YMCA. The sport he invented is now played by around 450 million people worldwide. FIBA has 212 national federations. The NBA has 30 teams and a multi-billion dollar TV deal. The Basketball Africa League tips off every summer. Chinese kids grow up worshipping Yao Ming. Filipino kids grow up idolizing PBA legends that Americans have never heard of. German teenagers play EuroLeague on streaming services. A Serbian center won three of the last five MVPs. A French 20-year-old is probably going to win one of the next five, at least.

Dr. James Naismith himself lived until 1939. He saw his sport become an Olympic event. He personally handed gold medals to the first Olympic champions. He did not live to see the NBA. When he wrote those 13 rules in December of 1891, he thought he was filling in two weeks of gym class. That's it. That was the whole ambition. Well, it looks like the gym class got a little bigger.