Every Original NBA Team and What Happened to Them

In the summer of 1946, a group of men who owned or operated some of the largest arenas in North America gathered in New York and agreed to start a basketball league. Most of them were hockey men, with money tied up in buildings that sat dark on the nights the ice was not in use. What they wanted, above all, was something to sell tickets for on those empty evenings. The idea for the first original NBA teams to fill in those voids started coming to life.

The eleven franchises that launched the Basketball Association of America in November 1946 were not, by and large, teams that cities had been clamoring for. They were tenants found for arenas that needed filling, which is why several of them were gone almost before the paint dried. The league did not even carry its familiar name yet; it became the National Basketball Association only in 1949, after merging with the older National Basketball League, and the NBA has since folded those three early seasons into its own official history.

Eleven teams started that first season. Three are still playing today – the Boston Celtics, the New York Knicks, and the Warriors, now in Golden State by way of San Francisco. The other eight died, four of them within a single year. What follows is every one of the original eleven, taken in the order they folded, from the franchises that lasted a single winter to the three that never left. It is a story of empty arenas and ruined balance sheets, and of the few survivors who happened to be standing in the right buildings when the music stopped.

Cleveland Rebels

One of the men credited with developing the jump shot, Ken Sailors, spent the 1946-47 season with the Cleveland Rebels – which means basketball’s future spent its first professional winter on a team that would not survive to a second. Sailors had honed the move at the University of Wyoming, leaping straight up and releasing over defenders who were still planting their feet for the old two-handed set shot. It was the coming thing, and Cleveland had it for exactly one winter.

The Rebels were the work of Albert Sutphin, who had built the Cleveland Arena in 1937 as a home for his minor-league hockey team and now wanted a basketball tenant to help pay for it. He stocked the roster with college talent, including Sailors and Frank Baumholtz, the latter a two-sport man who also spent a decade in the major leagues as an outfielder. They finished 30-30, good enough for the first playoffs, and won their opening postseason game against New York by 26 points before losing the next two at Madison Square Garden.

Then Sutphin added up the season and found a loss of around 75,000 dollars. He announced on June 9, 1947 that he had no further interest in promoting professional basketball, and the Rebels became the first of the eleven to vanish. Cleveland would wait 23 years for another team.

Detroit Falcons

The Detroit Falcons were never meant to play in Detroit. The franchise had been awarded to Indianapolis, where coach Glenn Curtis had signed on to run a team called the Rileys, but when no suitable court could be secured at the Indianapolis Coliseum the whole operation was bundled up and moved to the Detroit Olympia, the cavernous home of the Red Wings, for the inaugural 1946-47 season.

Curtis is the most interesting thing about the Falcons, though not for anything that happened in Detroit. Decades earlier, coaching high school basketball in Martinsville, Indiana, he had a teenage guard named John Wooden, who would go on to win ten national championships at UCLA, more than any coach before or since. Curtis himself lasted until January 1947 before resigning in poor health, handing a 20-40 team to Philip Sachs. The Falcons’ one bright spot was center Stan Miasek, who scored nearly 900 points and made the All-BAA First Team.

It was not enough. The Falcons folded on July 9, 1947, the second of the eleven to go, and Detroit was left without top-flight professional basketball for a decade, until the Fort Wayne Pistons relocated there in 1957 and stayed. The man who had once coached John Wooden never coached in the league again.

Pittsburgh Ironmen

The most consequential man ever to wear a Pittsburgh Ironmen uniform barely played, and is remembered today almost entirely for his son. Press Maravich suited up for the Ironmen in 1946-47 before turning to coaching, where he would eventually mold his boy Pete – Pistol Pete – into one of the most prolific scorers the game has produced. The father’s own professional career amounted to one year on the worst team in the league.

The Ironmen went 15-45, the poorest record in the BAA’s first season, playing out of Duquesne Gardens, a converted ice rink. Their leading lights were modest: John Abramovic, who had been the first college player to score 2,000 career points, and Coulby Gunther. Coach Paul Birch was hired so late that he mostly imported players from his old Youngstown team. The roster’s thinness showed in the very first game the Philadelphia Warriors ever played, when five Ironmen fouled out, Birch refused the offer to reinstate one of them, and the two teams finished the night playing four-on-four.

The owners insisted they wanted to come back. They could not find the money, and on July 27, 1947 the Ironmen folded alongside Toronto. Pittsburgh’s single year of professional basketball produced a last-place team and a four-on-four farce. Its most lasting contribution turned out to be a reserve guard who would raise a far better player than himself.

Toronto Huskies

To get into the first game in league history for free, you only had to be taller than George Nostrand. The Toronto Huskies, hosting the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 1, 1946, ran newspaper ads promising free admission to anyone who stood above their 6-foot-8 center, which tells you both how novel the sport was in Canada and how hard the Huskies were working to explain it. A crowd of 7,090 turned up, most paying between 75 cents and 2.50 dollars, and watched Toronto lose 68-66.

It went downhill from there. Player-coach Ed Sadowski quit within a month as the roster splintered into factions that reportedly stopped speaking to one another. After two interim coaches, the Huskies hired Red Rolfe, a four-time baseball All-Star with the Yankees who had been coaching at Yale, to steer them to a 22-38 finish. The owners, one of whom co-owned the Montreal Alouettes football club, were said to have lost around 100,000 dollars.

They folded on July 27, 1947. Canada would not get another professional basketball team for 49 years, when the Toronto Raptors arrived in 1995 – long enough that most Canadians never knew their country had been there at the very beginning, on the night the whole thing tipped off.

Providence Steamrollers

The 1947-48 Providence Steamrollers won six games. That is still the fewest any team has managed across a full season of BAA or NBA play, and it sits in the record book beside far more recent disasters like the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers and the 1998-99 Vancouver Grizzlies. The Steamrollers got there honestly, with a roster so depleted that their coach decided the best available option was himself.

That coach was Nat Hickey, who on January 27, 1948, three days short of his 46th birthday, activated himself as a player. He missed all five of his shots that night and fouled out of basketball entirely a day later, but in doing so he became – and remains – the oldest man ever to play in an NBA game, at 45 years and 363 days. No one has come within two years of the mark since.

Owned by Louis Pieri and playing at the Rhode Island Auditorium, the Steamrollers lasted three seasons and won 46 games in all, a rate of futility difficult to sustain on purpose. They folded in 1949. Providence has never had another team from any of the four major North American leagues, which makes the Steamrollers, of all unlikely franchises, the last word in big-league sport for an entire state.

St. Louis Bombers

In May 1949 the St. Louis Bombers signed a hometown kid to one of the richest contracts in professional basketball. Ed Macauley had starred just up the road at Saint Louis University, and ‘Easy Ed’ was worth the outlay – a smooth, skinny center who made the All-BAA team and carried the Bombers to a division title in 1948. For a small-market club in a league shedding franchises by the month, he was about as good as it got.

It was not enough to save them. By January 1950 the general manager was openly shopping the team, and on April 22, 1950 the Bombers dropped out as the league contracted from seventeen teams to eleven. Macauley was scooped up by the Boston Celtics, where he averaged better than 20 points a game and became one of the faces of the franchise.

Here the story turns strange. In 1956 the Celtics traded Macauley, along with the rights to Cliff Hagan, to the St. Louis Hawks – sending him home to the very city the Bombers had abandoned – in exchange for a single draft pick. That pick became Bill Russell. The Bombers’ best player had become, six years after his team folded, the price Boston paid for the future.

Chicago Stags

Before they were the Stags, they were briefly the Chicago Atomics, a name they wore for one exhibition game against the Knicks before thinking better of it. Under whatever banner, the Chicago franchise was good almost at once: a 39-22 record in 1946-47, second only to Washington, and a spot in the very first championship series, which they lost to the Philadelphia Warriors four games to one. They reached the playoffs in each of their four seasons.

None of it kept them alive. The Stags folded in 1950, casualties of the same contraction that took St. Louis, and their dissolution produced one of the stranger scenes in league history. Three Stags guards still needed homes: Max Zaslofsky, the league’s former scoring champion and the prize everyone wanted, plus Andy Phillip and a reluctant rookie named Bob Cousy. When the owners of New York, Philadelphia and Boston could not agree on who got whom, the commissioner wrote the three names on slips of paper and drew them from a hat.

New York pulled Zaslofsky and Philadelphia took Phillip. Boston, drawing last and grumbling, was left with Cousy – the one nobody had been angling for. Walter Brown said afterward that when he drew the name he could have fallen to the floor. He had just landed a Hall of Fame point guard by luck of the draw.

Washington Capitols

For one season, Washington had the best team in basketball. The 1946-47 Capitols went 49-11, a winning percentage of .817 that stood as the finest in BAA or NBA history for twenty years, until the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers. Their coach was a sharp, combustible 29-year-old named Red Auerbach. Then they met the Chicago Stags in the semifinals and lost, and the team that had run away with the season never reached the final.

Auerbach coached three seasons in Washington before leaving, eventually for Boston, where his name became permanently attached to championships he never came close to winning in the capital. The Capitols carried on without him and quietly made history that mattered far more than any record. On October 31, 1950, a rookie named Earl Lloyd took the floor for Washington against the Rochester Royals and became the first Black player to appear in an NBA game.

Lloyd lasted seven games before being drafted into the Army and sent to Korea. By the time he returned, there was no team to come back to. The Capitols, deep in financial trouble, folded in the middle of the 1950-51 season, in January 1951, dropping the league to ten clubs. The franchise that integrated the NBA did not survive the season in which it did so.

New York Knicks

The New York Knickerbockers owed their existence to Madison Square Garden and then spent their early years unable to get into it. League rules required that whoever ran a big arena had to own the team that played there, which is how Ned Irish, the Garden’s president and a former sportswriter, came to found the Knicks in 1946. The trouble was that the Garden was a busy building – boxing, hockey, the circus, college doubleheaders – and a fledgling pro basketball team ranked low on the list. So the Knicks played many of their first home games a mile away at the 69th Regiment Armory.

They were, at least, winners where it counted earliest. The Knicks took the first game in league history, beating the Toronto Huskies in Toronto on November 1, 1946, and it was their guard Ossie Schectman, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, who scored the first basket the league ever recorded, a plain two-handed layup.

Eighty years on, the Knicks are the only one of the original eleven still playing in the same city, under the same name. Every other charter franchise either died or moved. The Knicks simply stayed put, which in this company turns out to be a considerable achievement all by itself.

Philadelphia Warriors

Joe Fulks scored 63 points in a single game on February 10, 1949, a number so far beyond anything the young league had seen that it stood as the record for a full decade, until Elgin Baylor broke it in 1959. Fulks did it for the Philadelphia Warriors, the team that had already won the whole thing. ‘Jumpin’ Joe’ had taken the league’s first scoring title in 1946-47 at 23.2 points a game, in a season when no one else averaged better than 17.

The Warriors were run by Eddie Gottlieb, who had spent years coaching the Philadelphia SPHAS, an all-Jewish club in the old American Basketball League, and who assembled a roster of mostly inexperienced players around Fulks. It worked. Philadelphia won the inaugural 1947 championship, with Fulks pouring in 21 points in a single fourth quarter of the opening game – a mark that itself lasted until 1988.

The franchise has been moving and winning ever since. The Warriors left Philadelphia for San Francisco in 1962 and, as the Golden State Warriors, have gone on winning titles their first fans never saw. They are the only one of the original eleven to claim the league’s very first championship and keep collecting them into a century the founders could not have pictured.

Boston Celtics

Walter Brown re-mortgaged his house and borrowed against his life insurance to keep the Boston Celtics alive. Brown, who ran the Boston Garden and had founded the team in 1946 largely to fill open dates in his arena, watched it lose money and games in roughly equal measure – the Celtics posted a losing record in each of their first four seasons and gave Boston, a baseball and hockey town, very little reason to care.

The dynasty Russell built echoed decades later, when Celtics legend Robert Parish closed his career winning a fourth ring alongside Michael Jordan in Chicago.

What turned it around was a coach and a guard, both of whom arrived from teams that had not made it. Brown hired Red Auerbach in 1950. That same autumn the Celtics ended up with Bob Cousy, who would rewrite what a point guard could be. Soon came Bill Russell and the most dominant stretch in the sport’s history: eleven championships in thirteen seasons, the spine of a record that now stands at eighteen titles, more than any franchise has won.

It is a fitting place to end. The most successful team in the history of professional basketball was assembled, in part, from the wreckage of the league’s own failures – a coach who had gotten his start in Washington, a guard set loose when Chicago collapsed. Eight of the original eleven died. The Celtics gathered up what those dead franchises left behind and never stopped winning.

The league those eleven franchises launched in 1946 would one day supply every member of the 1992 Dream Team.