A teacher named James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. He made it as a game to play indoors in the winter. He wrote 13 rules for the new game. Many of those first rules were not like the rules of today.

In the first rules, a goal was made when the ball was thrown or batted into the basket and stayed there. A player could not run with the ball, and had to throw it from the spot where it was caught. A person stood by each basket to get the ball back out after a goal.

The first games were two 15-minute halves with five minutes of rest between them. Under the first rules, if a team made three fouls in a row, the other team was given a goal.

Today a player scores by getting the ball into the hoop, which is also called the basket. A basket made from inside the three-point line counts two points. A basket made from outside the line counts three points. A successful free throw counts one point.

The hoop is an orange metal ring, 18 inches across on the inside, with a net hanging from it. A basketball hoop is 10 feet above the floor, and the first peach-basket hoops hung 10 feet up too. The free throw line is 15 feet from the backboard, which is a rectangle six feet wide and three and a half feet tall.

The league that became the NBA began in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America. It took the name NBA in 1949. Each team has five players on the court. An NBA game has four periods of 12 minutes, which is 48 minutes in all.

Basketball became an Olympic sport for men at the 1936 Games in Berlin, Germany. The 1992 Olympic team of NBA stars, called the Dream Team, was the first U.S. Olympic team to include NBA players.

In the NBA, a team with the ball has 24 seconds to try a shot. The NBA added the 24-second shot clock for the 1954-55 season, when only eight teams were left, to make play faster.

Words to know

• invented: made up
• batted: hit with hand
• fouls: broken rules
• backboard: board behind hoop
• periods: game parts