James Naismith, who invented basketball, was born on November 6, 1861, in Almonte, Ontario, and died on November 28, 1939, and he was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1959. The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame is in Springfield, Massachusetts, the city where basketball was born.

The league that became the NBA began in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America, and took the name NBA in 1949. The 10-second center line was introduced in 1932-33 to reduce stalling. In the NBA, a team with the ball has 24 seconds to try a shot. The NBA also requires the offense to bring the ball across the midcourt line within 8 seconds.

In 1957-58 offensive goaltending was banned, so no player could touch the ball or basket when the ball was on the rim or above the cylinder, except the shooter in the original act of shooting.

Each NBA team has five players. A player is disqualified from the game when he receives his sixth personal foul.

The NBA Board of Governors approved the WNBA on April 24, 1996. The first WNBA game was played on June 21, 1997, when the New York Liberty beat the Los Angeles Sparks, 67-57, at the Great Western Forum. The Houston Comets became the first WNBA champions, beating the New York Liberty 65-51 behind Cynthia Cooper and a suffocating defense. In the WNBA, Lisa Leslie of the Los Angeles Sparks became the first player to dunk in a game, with a one-handed breakaway. As of April 2025, a WNBA ball must weigh 18 to 20 ounces and be between 28.5 and 29 inches around.

FIBA organized its first men's Basketball World Cup in Buenos Aires in 1950, and the first Women's Basketball World Cup three years later, in 1953, in Chile. On April 8, 1989, the FIBA World Congress decided to eliminate the distinction between amateurs and professionals, making all basketball players eligible for FIBA competitions, and as of July 2026, in the FIBA rules the court is 28 meters long and 15 meters wide, measured from the inner edge of the boundary line.

The NCAA women's tournament was first held in 1982, and it began with 32 teams and expanded to 64 teams before the 1994 season. As of June 2025, the NCAA men's tournament had grown to 16 teams in 1951, 32 in 1975 and 64 in 1985, and a First Four of opening games in 2011 took it to 68 teams.

Words to know

• stalling: slowing play
• goaltending: blocking a shot
• disqualified: put out
• amateurs: unpaid players
• enshrined: honored in