Play Begins
The Braves were one of three NBA expansion franchises that began play in the 1970–71 season (the others being the Portland Trail Blazers and Cleveland Cavaliers). They played their home games at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, sharing the arena with another new franchise, the NHL's Buffalo Sabres, who also debuted in 1970. In addition, from 1971–75, the Braves played a total of 16 home games at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, Ontario in the hopes of expanding their fan base beyond Western New York and into the Greater Toronto Area (a similar strategy has been employed by the NFL's Buffalo Bills since 2008). The NBA had two previous teams in Upstate New York, the Rochester Royals and the Syracuse Nationals, but these teams are now the Sacramento Kings and Philadelphia 76ers.
Read more about this topic: Buffalo Braves
Famous quotes containing the words play and/or begins:
“You’ll stay here with me my child, won’t you? It’s been so lonely without you. But you’ve come to me at last, haven’t you? Now you’ll sing for me and I’ll play and we’ll be together forever.”
—Eric Taylor, and Leroux. Arthur Lubin. Erique Claudin (Claude Rains)
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)