The National Alliance of Basketball Leagues is the descendant of the industrial-based basketball clubs that formed into the National Basketball League in the early 1930s. The league was the brainchild of Indianapolis grocer Irv Kautsky, who sponsored the Indianapolis Kautskys club team, and Goodyear Tire Company, who originally sponsored the Akron Wingfoots. After a false start in the early 1930s, the league was restarted in 1938, with the Wingfoots winning the initial NBL title. By World War II, both the Wingfoots and the Firestone Tire Company's Non Skids had suspended play, but other seminal pro teams such as the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons), Syracuse Nationals (now the Philadelphia 76ers), Rochester Royals (now the Sacramento Kings), Minneapolis Lakers (now the Los Angeles Lakers), and Tri-Cities BlackHawks (now the Atlanta Hawks), all of whom are currently playing in the NBA, had joined.
After WWII, the fledgling Basketball Association of America was established by arena owners in large cities to try to capture the popularity of the NBL teams from the smaller communities. This attempt failed miserably as 13 of the 16 BAA teams folded. Undaunted, the remaining BAA teams, the Philadelphia Warriors, Boston Celtics, and New York Knicks convinced the top NBL teams to join with them and they formed the NBA. Thus, the early NBA was composed mostly of teams brought over from the NBL and three BAA teams.
The remaining NBL teams reformed and changed the name to the National Industrial Basketball League (NIBL) where teams such as the Denver Truckers, Chicago Saints, Akron Wingfoots, Phillips 66ers, Peoria Cats, Philadelphia Tapers, Lexington Marathon Oilers and Cleveland Pipers thrived as club teams.
In the 1960s the league recognized the changing sponsorship of the teams away from the large industrial companies and renamed it the National AAU Basketball League (NABL). During the early 1960s the Pipers and the Tapers left to join the Hawaii Chiefs, Kansas City Steers, Los Angeles Jets and other teams to form the American Basketball League; when this venture folded, some of these teams returned to the NABL.
By the end of the 1970s the NABL teams elected to adapt touring schedules rather than league schedules and the NABL format was mothballed until it was brought back in the 1990s when many of the legendary teams had been restarted under a new wave of sponsors. Today, the NABL teams are focused on preparing post-college players for the opportunity to play FIBA pro basketball overseas.
Read more about National Alliance Of Basketball Leagues: Current Members
Famous quotes containing the words national, alliance, basketball and/or leagues:
“While I do not think it was so intended I have always been of the opinion that this turned out to be much the best for me. I had no national experience. What I have ever been able to do has been the result of first learning how to do it. I am not gifted with intuition. I need not only hard work but experience to be ready to solve problems. The Presidents who have gone to Washington without first having held some national office have been at great disadvantage.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can’t long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summon’d am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.”
—Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)