Basketball
- See also: Buffalo Braves
Although not as historically entrenched in Toronto culture as other sports, basketball does have significant milestones in the city. The first professional game of the Basketball Association of America, forerunner of the NBA, was contested at Maple Leaf Gardens between the Toronto Huskies and the New York Knickerbockers on November 1, 1946. However, the Huskies franchise folded after the league's inaugural season. The city would not host another professional basketball franchise until the 1970s when the Buffalo Braves played a total of 16 games at Maple Leaf Gardens before moving to San Diego. It wasn't until the Toronto Raptors joined the NBA for the 1995–96 season that the city had a team of its own. The franchise was one of two Canadian expansion teams announced by the NBA in 1993, the other being the Vancouver Grizzlies, which moved south of the border to Memphis after the 2000–01 season.
Toronto has also hosted parts of the 1994 FIBA World Championship.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Toronto
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)