American Basketball League (1925–1955)
The American Basketball League (ABL) was an existing 1925 to 1955 US professional league for basketball . The ABL is one of the most important of the first professional basketball leagues. It distinguished itself from competitive leagues with a local focus in that it was able to integrate national teams from the entire north east coast to Maryland and even Cleveland and Chicago, and later Toledo from the Midwest, into the game operations in the 1920s.
history
The ABL was founded by the then President of the National Hockey League , Joseph Carr. He managed to sign nine of the best teams in the country that were not yet organized in a league at the time. The dominant teams in the early years were the Cleveland Rosenblums , the Philadelphia SPHAs, and especially the Original Celtics . Between 1925 and 1931 the newly formed ABL was the first address in professional basketball. Of the original nine teams, only five played at the end of the 1930/31 season. One of the main reasons for this was that the league's team managers tended to have limited financial resources. For example, at the height of the global economic crisis , the ABL had to stop playing for two seasons after 1931. The ABL was brought back to life on the east coast in 1933, but quickly lost its popularity and importance compared to the National Basketball League (NBL) founded in the Midwest in 1937 . After the National Basketball Association (NBA) emerged from the merger of the NBL and the BAA in 1949 , the ABL was relegated to a minor league , lost all of its competitiveness and was dissolved in 1955.
Game mode
The ABL often split the playing times in half. The two teams with the most wins in each of the two halves played the champions of the season in a play-off . Exceptions were the 1927/28 season, in which the teams were divided into two divisions from the start and the championship was played out accordingly under the two division winners; the 1941/42 season, in which the Wilmington Blue Bombers won both halves of the season and thus made playoffs superfluous ; and the 1944/45 season , which was planned for an undivided season due to the war-related travel restrictions, and in which the top four teams in the playoffs met (the first on the third and the second on the fourth).
The Original Celtics in the ABL
Under their official name "New York Celtics", the Original Celtics were already a dominant team in the early 1920s. After five game days of the ABL season 1926/27 they replaced the team of the Brooklyn Arcadians and so joined the league. For this they adopted the team name "Brooklyn Celtics". The Celtics won 32 of the remaining 37 games. The following year they competed under their old name and won the championship. Following the season, the owners of the other teams voted to exclude the Celtics from the ABL.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d ABL (1925-1955) on Hoopedia website ( Memento from January 30, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ sportsecyclopedia.com , accessed May 28, 2011
- ^ Association of Professional Basketball Research website , accessed May 28, 2011
- ^ Charles Rosen: The first tip-off: the incredible story of the birth of the NBA . McGraw-Hill, 2009, p. 12.
- ↑ Douglas Stark: Wartime Basketball. The Emergence of a National Sport during World War II. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln / London 2016. ISBN 9780803245280 (in English)