The NBA Teams That Disappeared Forever

The NBA as we know it today is a pretty stable business. With 30 teams, the league is actively trying to make a push to get to 32 soon. But it wasn’t always this way. The BAA, the NBA’s predecessor, had 11 teams. While it has grown into this 30-team league, it lost a lot of franchises along the way. In fact, only three founding franchises exist today. There is a lot of history here with some very good teams having their stories lost to time, including one of the league's original champions. Today, we will tell these stories as we dig through the basketball graveyard. There are 23 teams we will cover today, but before we dive all the way in, I want to get ahead of the ABA problem. This is something this will always be a problem when talking about pre-1970s basketball. The NBA does not include ABA stats in its record book. This includes 8 ABA franchises that folded before or because of the merger. I will cover these teams today, both in an effort to give as much of a complete a story as possible. I also want to shout out nbahoopsonline.com, which is where I was able to find the vast majority of the information we will cover today, especially for the very early NBA teams, as well as basketball reference, which is the goat and the backbone of most of NBA content creation. Without further ado, let’s begin our journey through the Basketball Graveyard. 🔴 SUBSCRIBE:    / airj_yt   ⚫️ TIKTOK:   / rjbick_   🟣 TWITCH:   / rjbick   🟡 INSTAGRAM:   / aboveinfluence.hoops   🔵 TWITTER: https://x.com/RJBick_ Title: Basketball’s Lost Teams: Every Defunct Franchise’s History What's the point of reading all this and not subscribing? #RJBick #basketball #videoessay