According to Brad Herzog, author of The Sports 100, Organized basketball is played by more than 250 million people worldwide, and the game is threatening to overtake even soccer as the most popular sport on the globe. The basketball hoop is the centerpiece of the inner-city playground, the focus of the farmland, the staple of every high school gymnasium. The NCAA Tournament and the NBA Finals have taken their places next to the Super Bowl and the World Series as mega-events. Various basketball figures rank among the most publicized and lionized icons in American sports.
From James Naismith's posting of his original set of thirteen rules on December 21, 1891, the sport rapidly spread across the nation. Many of the Springfield College student brought the game back to their hometowns as well as to other countries through missionary work. By the early years of the twentieth century, basketball was incorporated as an organized sport in most high schools and colleges in North American. Its advantages included minimal equipment costs (given the fact that most schools-and other institutions such as YMCAs and Boys Clubs-already had constructed spacious gymnasiums), the small number of required players, and its suitability for indoors during the long, cold winters experienced by northern climes.
Whereas high school and college teams tended to foster regional rivalries, the rise of pro basketball helped promote the sport on a larger scale. The National Basketball Association, formed out of the 1949 merger of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America, gradually ascended to the sport's center stage as a result of interest generated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by the excellence of the Boston Celtics franchise, superstar players such as Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, and the implementation of twenty-four-second clock which paved the transition to a faster-paced game.
It took the leadership of David Stern, commissioner of the NBA since 1983, to complete the transformation of the NBA. The centerpiece of Stern's reforms was the 1983 Collective Bargaining Agreement, which ended a decade of confrontation between team owners and players and set the pattern for a cooperative approach to problem-solving among league franchises. The development of the NBA draft lottery and All-Star activities into major media events as well as the gearing of league-produced
television shows, advertisements, and highlight films to the MTV generation furthered the appeal of basketball, particularly among younger fans.
Stern's legacy has been even more impressive abroad. Herzog notes, The NBA…has surpassed pro baseball and football in the international market. NBA games are now televised in more than 100 countries and foreign sales of NBA products have passed the $250 million mark. The 1992 Olympic “Dream Team” members were treated like international rock stars. Basketball is fast approaching soccer as the world's most popular sport-both a product and a cause of the NBA's success.
In the 1990s, the NBA expanded to include two franchises in Canada-Toronto and Vancouver-and has frequently scheduled both preseason and regular games in Mexico, Japan, and Europe. The commitment of sporting goods companies-most notably, athletic shoe firms such as Nike and Reebok-to developing positive images for the players acting as their spokesmen via charitable work, photo ops, and Hollywood-styled ads has assisted in promoting the NBA. The game's appealed has also been heightened by increased media exposure for the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual sixty-four team tournament, better known as “March Madness.”
