In an age where teenage hoop stars sign multimillion-dollar endorsement deals before their first professional tip-offs, it's hard to imagine a time when basketball was among the least publicized of all professional sports. After the game's creation in 1891, establishing a viable professional league was an intense struggle, requiring decades of hard work and dedication from players, owners, coaches and fans. While the game evolved from two-handed set shots, fruit baskets, short-shorts and tiny gyms to slam dunks, shoe endorsements, global popularity and massive urban arenas, the NBA established itself as one of the world's dominant professional leagues. This work, the first comprehensive history of the National Basketball Association, offers a detailed look at how and why the NBA was able to overcome the obstacles that had crushed its predecessors and competitors to become the most successfully marketed league in professional sports. Covered here are Naismith's invention of the game; the rise and fall of the NBL, BAA, ABL and ABA; early teams like the Buffalo Germans and the Harlem Rens; basketball's Olympic debut in 1936; the first professional superstars; dominant franchises; and the current state of the league. Appendices offer lists of early professional basketball leagues and commissioners of the NBA, NBL and ABA.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.

This Brief identifies and contrasts the groups of National Basketball Association (NBA) expansion franchises and of any teams that relocated from one metropolitan area or city to another from 1950 to 2013. It discusses historical differences and similarities in the teams’ markets and performances and then as members of divisions and conferences. It measures and compares the emergence, development, and success of the teams by analyzing demographic, economic and sport-specific data. It also discusses the respective mergers of the Basketball Association of America and National Basketball League in 1949, and the American Basketball Association and National Basketball Association in 1976. National Basketball Association Strategies makes an important, relevant, and useful contribution to the literature regarding professional sports operations and to the NBA’s short and long run business strategies in American culture. Besides numerous sports fans within metropolitan areas and extended markets of these NBA teams, the book’s audiences are sports historians and researchers, college and public libraries, and current and potential NBA franchise owners and team executives. This Brief may also be used as a reference or supplemental text for college and university students enrolled in such applied undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars as sports administration, sports business, and sports management.

Finger-Ring Lore : Historical, Legendary, Anecdotal Rings of inferior metal, engraved with the king’s name, may, probably, have been worn by officials of the court. In the Londesborough collection is a bronze ring, bearing on the oval face the name of Amunoph III., the same monarch known to the Greeks as ‘Memnon.’ The other ring, also of bronze, has engraved on the face a scarabæus. Such rings were worn by the Egyptian soldiers. In the British Museum are some interesting specimens of Egyptian rings with representations of the scarabæus, or beetle. These rings generally bear the name of the wearer,[Pg 6] the name of the monarch in whose reign he lived, and also the emblems of certain deities; they were so set in the gold ring as to allow the scarabæus to revolve on its centre, it being pierced for that purpose. Colonel Barnet possesses an Egyptian signet-ring formed by a scarabæus set in gold. It was found on the little finger of a splendid gilded mummy at Thebes. In all probability the wearer of the ring had been a royal scribe, as by his side was found a writing-tablet of stone. On the breast was a large scarabæus of green porphyry, set in gold. The Rev. Henry Mackenzie, of Yarmouth, possesses an Egyptian scarabæus, a signet-ring, set with an intaglio, on cornelian, found in the bed of a deserted branch of the Euphrates, in the district of Hamadân in Persia. The engraving is unfinished, the work is polished in the intaglio, and the date has therefore been supposed not later than the time of the Greeks in Persia, circa 325 b.c.