Basketball in Canada
overview of basketball in Canada
Basketball in Canada dates back to the 20th century. Basketball is played year-round by men and women and various levels of competition. Several professional basketball leagues have teams based in Canada.
History
James Naismith, a Canadian who moved to the United States, invented basketball in Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1890s. This new sport soon became popular as an indoor sport that needed a minimal equipment, gaining popularity at high schools and colleges in Canada.
The Toronto Huskies were co-founders of the Basketball Association of America, a forerunner of the NBA, but disbanded after the first season.
In Canada, the sport has long lived in the shadow of ice hockey, but in the early 21st century the sport saw a rise in popularity, partly due to the Toronto Raptors, an expansion National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise established in 1995. The Vancouver Grizzlies was another NBA expansion franchise that was based in Vancouver, British Columbia from 1995 to 2001, when it was relocated to Memphis, Tennessee.
The National Basketball League was played for one and a half seasons in 1993 and 1994.
In 2011, a new domestic league was formed, the National Basketball League of Canada (NBL Canada).
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This entry incorporates text from “Basketball in Canada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.