The National Basketball League (NBL) was one of the oldest professional basketball leagues created in the United States. Established in 1935 as the Midwest Basketball Conference, it changed its name to the National Basketball League on October 6, 1937, weeks before it was set to begin its third season of play.
Before the NBL was created, the best basketball teams were barnstorming operations like the Original Celtics, the New York Renaissance, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the Philadelphia Sphas (some of whom also played in the rival American Basketball League)., pp. 4–5 After the 1948–49 season, the NBL merged operations with the Basketball Association of America (BAA) to form the National Basketball Association (NBA). Despite being younger than the NBL, the BAA was considered more prestigious due to its presence in larger cities. The modern NBA has adopted the BAA's history as its own, with the NBL's history garnering only occasional recognition.
Five current NBA teams trace their history back to the NBL: the Atlanta Hawks (formerly the Buffalo Bisons/Tri-Cities Blackhawks), the Detroit Pistons (formerly the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons), the Los Angeles Lakers (formerly the Detroit Gems/Minneapolis Lakers), the Philadelphia 76ers (formerly the Syracuse Nationals), and the Sacramento Kings (formerly the Rochester Royals, though their history dates back to 1923 as the Rochester Seagrams). Six former BAA/NBA teams also traced their roots to the NBL: the Indianapolis Jets (formerly the Indianapolis Kautskys), the Anderson Packers (formerly the Anderson Duffey Packers), the original Denver Nuggets (not to be confused with the current Denver Nuggets NBA team that exists from the former Denver Rockets ABA team), the Sheboygan Red Skins, the Waterloo Hawks, and the Indianapolis Olympians (who were meant to be an NBL expansion team before joining the NBA instead). Another NBL team that is still active is the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, who currently play as an Amateur Athletic Union Elite club.
History
Predecessor history The NBL was initially founded as the Midwest Basketball Conference (MBC) in 1935. The league was created by Frank Kautsky (who owned Kautsky's Grocery store in Indianapolis) and Paul Sheeks (who was the athletic and recreation director for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in Akron, Ohio), who both wanted to resurrect the defunct National Professional Basketball League, which had played for a single season in 1932-33. The NPBL had included the works teams Kautsky and Sheeks owned and operated-which were the Indianapolis Kautskys and Akron Firestone Non-Skids (reportedly then known as the Akron Firestones) respectively. Seven other teams began the season-the Toledo Crimson Coaches Tobaccos (the only other winning team that season), the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots (supposedly named the Akron Goodyear Webfoots that season), Fort Wayne Chiefs, Muncie Whys, South Bend Guardsmen, Kokomo Kelts, and Lorain Fisher Foods. However, the dropouts of Lorain, Kokomo, Muncie, and South Bend left the league with only five teams at the end of the season, with the Goodyear team only having 6 games played in that league.).
Kautsky and Sheeks created the new league with no real plan of action outside of being what can be considered an amateur or semi-professional basketball league of sorts (with the players there also working for the sponsorship they had played for under this time) with good competition in mind. One of the ways they made sure the sport was competitive was by eliminating rules which had previously slowed the game down significantly (such as having a jump ball after every foul shot, if not every shot in general), which helped make sure the game's action remained consistent with its flow in its first season (with the following season later removing jump balls after every basket made in general). They also implemented rules that would (mostly) be used to help become the set predecessors for modern-era basketball to this day as opposed to the roughhouse sport that it was considered to be back in that period of time., pp. 17–18 Games played in at least their first season were done on the weekends (usually Sunday afternoons) since teams could schedule non-league games on later days of their weeks, partially due to blue laws in the United States and appealing to people in relation to them.
During their two seasons under the Midwest Basketball Conference name, they had a total of 16 different teams competing throughout the league (though two of them were slated to be a rebranding of a different team from the first to the second season), with as many as 12 teams, but as few as 8 (later 9) teams competing at any given time during their regular seasons. The teams that competed in the MBC were mostly works teams teams (alongside the aforementioned Kautskys and Firestone Non-Skids, businesses like Hed-Aids, U.S. Tire, Inc., the Young Men's Hebrew Association (labeled as the Y.M.H.A.), the Dayton Metropolitan Clothing Stores, Cooper Buses (being the only Canadian-based team to enter the MBC coming from Windsor, Ontario, thus making the MBC the first ever international basketball league in existence ahead of the Basketball Association of America), and the Duffy Florals later on had teams in their inaugural season, with Goodyear, Altes Lagers (representing a rebranding from the Hed-Aids to the Altes Lagers for the Detroit franchise), the Miami Valley Brewing Company (representing a rebranding from the Metropolitans to the London Bobbys), the Columbus Athletic Supply (using the same name for their team), General Electric, and HyVis Oil (being referred to as HyVis Oilers sometimes) having teams for the following season afterward, with Seagram initially having the Rochester Seagrams (later Sacramento Kings) be included there before reneging on joining the MBC due to travel concerns) being joined alongside a couple of independently ran teams in the Buffalo Bisons barnstorming team (though they previously played in the original American Basketball League and New York State Basketball League alongside independent play before joining the MBC (and by extension, the NBL afterward)) and the Whiting Ciesar All-Americans (with Ciesar in question being team owner and car dealer Eddie Ciesar) during their two seasons of play under that name.
The community working aspect of those teams in particular would prove to be a major driving point for the MBC and later NBL's success throughout their existence as a league, with small profits being a secondary factor in mind for some of these team owners when compared to the interest of the game and helping the local community within the area., p. 5 The first champions of the MBC, the Chicago Duffy Florals, were considered controversial champions due to their late status as a team that joined the MBC (which had them upset more established clubs in the Firestone Non-Skids and Kautskys despite the Detroit Hed-Aids looking more like a proper team for the round-robin playoffs instead), while the second and final champions of the MBC, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots, owned by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company that was also stationed in Akron, would sweep the Fort Wayne General Electrics (owned by General Electric, who primarily operated in New York, but set their team up in their Fort Wayne, Indiana area) 2–0 and became one of the inaugural teams of the MBC turned NBL alongside the Kautskys, Firestone Non-Skids, and General Electrics (among 13 total teams to start out the inaugural NBL season, most of which were originally holdovers from the MBC, with the inaugural MBC champion Chicago Duffy Florals, the Detroit Hed-Aids / Altes Lagers, and Indianapolis U.S. Tires not joining the NBL by the 1937–38 season alongside the Windsor Cooper Buses from the inaugural season; those three teams in question were soon replaced by the Oshkosh All-Stars, Kankakee Gallagher Trojans, and Richmond King Clothiers (later known as the Cincinnati Comellos after three games played into their only season of existence) by the start of the NBL's debut season) when their transition to the National Basketball League was made official. The league officially changed its name from the Midwest Basketball Conference to the National Basketball League on October 6, 1937, weeks before the start of their new season by that time, in an attempt to both attract a larger audience by becoming a more professional basketball league by comparison to their original starting point and to avoid further confusion with the Big Ten Conference, which was often referred to as the Midwest Conference.
General history The NBL was created, in part, by three major corporations: Firestone, Goodyear, and General Electric, with Firestone's Paul Sheeks in particular being a key contributor in its creation. Alongside them, Frank Kautsky of Kautsky's Grocery was considered a major contributor to the creation of the league as well. The league was primarily made up of Great Lakes area small-market and corporate-based teams, with many of these businesses (either large or small) in question (such as Firestone, Goodyear, General Electric, Kautsky's Grocery, the Columbus Athletic Supply (again, using the same name as the team there in this specific case), Dayton Metropolitan Clothing Stores, King Clothier, HyVis (Penn) Oil, White Horse Motors, the Zollner Piston Company (later Zollner Pistons, LLC), Jim White Chevrolet of Toledo, Studebaker (via the United Auto Workers Association), Chase Brass, the Allmen Transfer & Moving Company, the American Gear & Manufacturing Company, Willys-Overland Jeep Plant (representing Jeep specifically), the American Gear Company, Duffey Meat Packing, Inc., and the Dow Chemical Company) being a key factor in deciding whether certain teams (and by extension, the league as a whole at certain points) would succeed or fail throughout most of its existence since some of these businessmen saw the NBL's profits as secondary in nature to the love of the game of basketball and/or being something that's ultimately a great thing for the communities of the places that had the sports teams in question., pp. 229–230 However, it would ultimately be the teams that would be considered independently owned and not owned by another business (meaning teams that did not put their business affiliation either as a part of or alongside their actual team name in question) that would end up having the biggest long-term survival beyond the NBL's existence, with the few teams that had relied on their business ownership in the past sacrificing it as a part of their team name(s) in order to survive as best as they could, with at least one of them still doing so to the present day.