What do you think of this fact?
In today’s NBA, dozens of threes swish through the net every game. The very first basketball game looked a little different: there was exactly one basket, the ball was a soccer ball, and the hoops were peach baskets.
A gym teacher, a janitor, two baskets
In the winter of 1891, James Naismith, then 31, was asked to invent an indoor game at what is now Springfield College in Massachusetts. His students had cabin fever, and gymnastics alone wasn’t cutting it.
Naismith asked the janitor for two boxes to use as goals. There weren’t any, but the janitor brought two peach baskets. Naismith nailed them to the railing of the gym’s balcony, ten feet above the floor. That height is still the standard today.
He also wrote 13 rules, typed them up and pinned them to the bulletin board. On December 21, 1891, it was game time. Naismith tossed a soccer ball up between two players, and play began. Actual basketballs only showed up in 1894.
18 players, one basket
There were 18 students on the floor, split into two teams of nine. Since everyone wanted to be the one to score, the ball didn’t get passed around much. The final score was 1-0. The only basket came from a student named William R. Chase, reportedly in the final few seconds.
Five players per team only became the standard in 1897.
The baskets still had bottoms at first. At an early college game in 1895, according to Hamline University, an umpire had to climb a ladder after every score to get the ball back out.
From fruit basket to net
That problem was later solved by a simple idea: nets without a bottom. Since then the ball just drops through, and nobody has to climb anything.
The game spread through the YMCA network at record speed. By 1895, colleges were playing each other, and today almost everyone on the planet knows basketball.
All because a janitor didn’t have any boxes.