1.1: Origins, 1891 to 1946

Chapter 1: History and eras

How the game began and what it looked like before the founding league: the invention, the thirteen rules, and the fifty-five years before a professional league lasted.

No new terms introduced. No diagrams.

Chapter 3 taught what a possession is made of and Chapter 4 will teach how it is stopped. This chapter is about where those things came from, and it is organized on one rule: an era begins and ends at a dated event, not at a change in how the basketball looked. A rule change is a date. A league merging with another is a date. “The game got faster in the sixties” is an impression, and impressions make boundaries that cannot be checked, so this chapter does not use them. Each era below is bounded by an event with a source, and where the date of an event is not on file, this site says so rather than guessing.

This lecture covers the first fifty-five years: one gymnasium, thirteen rules, and no professional league that lasted. Figure 1 is the whole chapter on one line, so the length of each era is visible before any of them is read. The first band is longer than the other four together, which is the fact about basketball history that a list of eras hides.

Figure 1: The five eras, drawn from the dates in data/eras.yml. Each band runs from one dated rule change or founding to the next: Origins 1891 to 1946, the founding league 1946 to 1954, the shot-clock game 1954 to 1979, the three-point line 1979 to 2001, and the paint opens from 2001. The last band is drawn with an open right edge because the era is current and has no end boundary on file.

Era

Origins, 1891 to 1946

Begins

December 1891: Naismith writes the original rules of the game at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Ends

November 1946: the Basketball Association of America plays its first season.

What it looked like

A center jump after every score, a set shot taken with both feet on the floor, and no professional league that outlived its decade.

Era 1: The origins era: from one gymnasium to a league that lasted.

1 The invention

The game was invented on purpose, by one person, in response to a specific problem. Springfield College records that “the game was invented by Springfield College instructor and graduate student James Naismith in 1891”,¹ and that the class it was invented for met in “the winter of 1891-1892”.² Naismith had been given a class of restless students and a charge from Luther Gulick, the school’s physical education superintendent, to devise an indoor activity that would hold them.

What he produced was, in the college’s own account, an adaptation of several games then played: passing from American rugby, the jump ball from English rugby, the goal from lacrosse. He asked the janitor for two boxes and was given two peach baskets, which he nailed to the rail of the gymnasium’s running track. Then he “drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul.”³

Two things in that account matter for the rest of this site. The first is that the goal was horizontal and above the players’ heads, which is why nearly every action in Chapter 3 is about arriving at a spot rather than crossing a line. The second is that a foul was defined in the first thirteen rules, which is why the defensive vocabulary of Chapter 4 is so largely a vocabulary about what a defender may not do.

2 What the game looked like

For most of this era the game had two features that no modern viewer would recognize.

A center jump after every score. Possession was contested at the middle of the floor after each basket rather than handed to the conceding team, so a team with a dominant center could win possession repeatedly and a game could be a series of jump balls.

The set shot. The jump shot was not yet standard; the standard shot was taken with both feet on the floor. A game played with set shots from distance and a contested jump after every basket produced scores that look like misprints beside modern ones.

This is also the era in which the game spread furthest fastest, through the YMCA network and the colleges, and the reason it did is that the rules fitted on a page. Springfield College records that “a few weeks after the game was invented, students introduced the game at their own YMCAs.”⁴

3 The professional game before 1946

Professional leagues existed in this period and did not last. The one that ends this era is the Basketball Association of America, which played its first season in 1946-47 and is described by the league itself as “the precursor to the modern-day NBA”.⁵ That season was sixty games long, and NBA.com’s own account of it notes that “television was still in the future, and radio broadcasts were hardly universal.”⁶

No star cards in this era. The awards this chapter counts (Most Valuable Player, Finals Most Valuable Player) did not exist before the 1950s, and the only reachable primary source for a figure from this period is the Hall of Fame’s own inductee list, which gives a class year and no playing record. Rather than describe players from memory, this site leaves the era without star cards and names the gap. James Naismith is on that list as a contributor, in the Class of 1959, and he appears here as the inventor rather than as a player.

The idea to carry into lecture 1.2 is that the game had spread across a continent before anyone had built a professional league capable of surviving a decade. The next lecture is about the league that did, and about what it had to change to hold an audience.

Footnotes

1. Springfield College, “Where Basketball was Invented: The History of Basketball”, https://springfield.edu/about/birthplace-of-basketball, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “The game was invented by Springfield College instructor and graduate student James Naismith in 1891”; “the winter of 1891-1892”; “then drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul”; “A few weeks after the game was invented, students introduced the game at their own YMCAs.”; and, on the rules page, “written by Springfield College graduate instructor James Naismith in December 1891”. Saved as springfield-birthplace in the source registry.

2. Springfield College, “Where Basketball was Invented: The History of Basketball”, https://springfield.edu/about/birthplace-of-basketball, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “The game was invented by Springfield College instructor and graduate student James Naismith in 1891”; “the winter of 1891-1892”; “then drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul”; “A few weeks after the game was invented, students introduced the game at their own YMCAs.”; and, on the rules page, “written by Springfield College graduate instructor James Naismith in December 1891”. Saved as springfield-birthplace in the source registry.

3. Springfield College, “Where Basketball was Invented: The History of Basketball”, https://springfield.edu/about/birthplace-of-basketball, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “The game was invented by Springfield College instructor and graduate student James Naismith in 1891”; “the winter of 1891-1892”; “then drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul”; “A few weeks after the game was invented, students introduced the game at their own YMCAs.”; and, on the rules page, “written by Springfield College graduate instructor James Naismith in December 1891”. Saved as springfield-birthplace in the source registry.

4. Springfield College, “Where Basketball was Invented: The History of Basketball”, https://springfield.edu/about/birthplace-of-basketball, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “The game was invented by Springfield College instructor and graduate student James Naismith in 1891”; “the winter of 1891-1892”; “then drew up the 13 original rules, which described, among other facets, the method of moving the ball and what constituted a foul”; “A few weeks after the game was invented, students introduced the game at their own YMCAs.”; and, on the rules page, “written by Springfield College graduate instructor James Naismith in December 1891”. Saved as springfield-birthplace in the source registry.

5. NBA.com, “Season Review: 1946-47”, https://www.nba.com/history/season-recap/1946-47, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “In the first season of the BAA, the precursor to the modern-day NBA, a new professional star emerged”; “The 60-game regular season”; “Television was still in the future, and radio broadcasts were hardly universal.” Saved as nba-recap-1946-47.

6. NBA.com, “Season Review: 1946-47”, https://www.nba.com/history/season-recap/1946-47, retrieved 2026-09-21. Verbatim: “In the first season of the BAA, the precursor to the modern-day NBA, a new professional star emerged”; “The 60-game regular season”; “Television was still in the future, and radio broadcasts were hardly universal.” Saved as nba-recap-1946-47.