Recent history has not been kind to the Knicks, but times were good and wins were plentiful if you look far enough into the past, including 74 years ago this week, when New York outdueled Toronto in the first Basketball Associate of America game in history.
If you’re confused by the BAA not being called the NBA, it might be because you aren’t 100 years old. The BAA was the precursor to the NBA. The league renamed itself as the NBA in 1949, and in 1976 the NBA merged with the American Basketball Association, or ABA, to form the NBA that we all know and love.