The NBA of today has no resemblance to the NBA of 1949.
August 3rd, 1949 is the official birthdate of the National Basketball Association although the league does point out that the NBA began life as the Basketball Association of America in 1946. The National part of the name comes from a league with Mid-Western American roots, the National Basketball League which started in 1937. There are five NBA franchises that were in that league, the Atlanta Hawks, the Detroit Pistons, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Philadelphia 76ers and the Sacramento Kings, all of those franchises were in different cities in the NBL. The NBL was an industrial league set up with players working for companies and playing for company teams. The NBL had Negro players on rosters in 1942.
The Basketball Association of America began operations in 1946 when east coast arena owners decided to schedule open dates in their buildings with basketball games. In 1947, NBA owners enticed the American Basketball League’s Baltimore Bullets ownership to jump leagues. The BAA poached the NBL for teams in 1948 because the league wanted George Mikan of the Minneapolis Lakers who was the major star of the day. The BAA also took Rochester, a loaded team and Fort Wayne, whose owner Fred Zollner had a lot of money. The 1949 NBA had 17 teams. The NBA merger was so unimportant that the marriage did not have to be approved by Congress even though the deal probably violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The BAA-NBA had a color barrier during its first four years of existence. The league did have a Japanese-American player Wat Misaka who played for the New York Knicks in 1947 just a year after the last Japanese internment camp in the US closed. In 1950 that the owners decided to employ Negro players. NBA players of 1949 would not recognize the NBA of today.
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The Knicks played the Toronto Huskies in the first BAA game.
