History of the Los Angeles Lakers
Sports team history
The Los Angeles Lakers franchise has a long and storied history, having played and won championships in both the National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) prior to the 1949 merger which formed the National Basketball Association (NBA). The franchise traces its roots to the NBL's Detroit Gems which was launched in 1946 and relocated to Minneapolis in 1947 to become the Lakers.
The Lakers are one of the NBA's most famous and successful franchises. As of August 2024, the Lakers are second in the NBA's all-time records for wins (3,550) and winning percentage (.591), and hold the all-time record for most NBA Finals appearances (32). They are second in NBA championship wins with 17, just behind the Boston Celtics with 18 NBA titles, and with nine more Finals appearances than the Celtics, their biggest rival. Their team has had many NBA legends, including George Mikan, Jim Pollard, Clyde Lovellette, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Gail Goodrich, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jamaal Wilkes, James Worthy, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol, LeBron James, and Anthony Davis.
1946–1958: Detroit beginnings and Minneapolis dynasty
The franchise was founded in 1946 as the Detroit Gems, led by founder/owner C. King Boring and his business partner Maurice Winston, and played in the National Basketball League (NBL) during the 1946–47 season where it finished last in the league with only 4 wins in 44 games. Though the team was scheduled to continue in the NBL the following season, its ownership, faced with high losses due to low attendance and lack of homecourt, decided on selling the team to Ben Berger and Morris Chalfen of Minnesota for $15,000 in June 1947. Minneapolis sportswriter Sid Hartman played a key behind-the-scenes role in helping put together the deal and later the team, including helping them hire John Kundla from College of St. Thomas, to be their first head coach, by meeting with him and selling him on the team.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “History of the Los Angeles Lakers” is sports team history. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through History, Angeles and Lakers, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q929032. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1946, 1947 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of the Los Angeles Lakers” 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.