Territorial pick
A Territorial Pick is a special procedure invented in 1949 and abolished in 1965 in the Basketball Association of America (BAA) to allow teams in the NBA draft an initial access to college players from the local area. Teams could sacrifice their first-round pick to get a player who had gone to college within 50 miles of the NBA team's town. This way, a team could sign a player even if another team picked that person with the first pick.
The background to this rule was that the NBA wanted to encourage popular college stars to join the closest professional team. In this way, these "local heroes" should pull their fans into a neighboring NBA team, because at the time college basketball was more respected than professional basketball , which was considered "precarious".
Territorial picks that made it into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame included Wilt Chamberlain , Oscar Robertson , Tom Heinsohn , Dave DeBusschere , Gail Goodrich and Paul Arizin . Chamberlain created a curiosity: since he had gone to college in Kansas City but Kansas did not have an NBA team, the Philadelphia Warriors pointed out that Chamberlain had attended Overbrook High School in Philadelphia. This made him the only Territorial Pick in NBA history to be signed to a team because of his high school membership.
In 1965 the concept of Territorial Picks was abolished because a paradigm shift had taken place with regard to the reception of professional basketball as the “League of Stars”.