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Nothin' but net.

Basketball is my favorite sport,
I like the way they dribble up and down the court,
Just like I'm the king on the microphone,
So is Dr. J and Moses Malone,
I like slam dunks, that take me to the hoop,
My favorite play is the alley-oop,
I like the pick-and-roll, I like the give-and-go,
'Cause it's basketball, uh, Mister Kurtis Blow!
They're playing basketball, We love that basketball!
Kurtis Blow, "Basketball"

*BZZZT!* Now explaining basketball, Number 1, TV Tropes!

One of the Big Four team sports in the United States (American Football, Baseball, and Ice Hockey are the others) and one of the most popular sports worldwide, Basketball has as rich and interesting of a history as one expects it to have. Basketball has a reputation of "easy to play, difficult to master": for casual players about all you need is a ball and the presence of a nearby court (be it a public one or just a driveway hoop) to shoot away.

Basketball was created in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian-born physical fitness professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts. Wanting to find a way to allow his students to exercise indoors during the cold New England winters, after coming up with a game that would involve throwing a ball into a raised goal, he looked for some boxes for goals, but only found peach baskets to nail up. Dr. Naismith's original version of the game is very different from the one played today, as he changed many of the original rules himself while testing the game with his students.

Thus, "basket-ball", in its earliest recorded form, was born.

Modern basketball got its start in 1954, when Danny Biasone and Leo Ferris promoted the 24-second shot clock (technically, neither invented the shot clock, but having it be twenty-four seconds duration was their idea);note  The team in possession of the ball has twenty-four seconds to attempt a shot that at least touches the rim.note  Before the shot clock, many teams would stall as long as they could, resulting in non-eventful and extremely tedious games, to the point where some quarters would be left scoreless, with one really low point involving a game with a final score of 19-18. After the National Basketball Association implemented the shot clock and overhauled the foul system—creating the fast paced game we know today—attendance at NBA games rose by 40%.

The objective of basketball is for one of two teams to have the highest point total by the end of the game. Basketball teams are made up of fifteen players, with ten players, split into two teams of five, on the court at any given time, with the five remaining members on the bench. Each of the five on-court players fill a certain position upon the court, along with their own responsibilities. These player positions include the Point Guard (the team's best passer and ballhandler, responsible for both dribbling the ball up towards the team's side of the court, and relaying which offensive or defensive play the team will execute) the Shooting Guard (traditionally not the best ballhandler, but more than makes up for it in their ability to score and control the ball from a variety of distances), the Center (the team's Big Guy, focused less on scoring and more on gaining or regaining possession of the ball, whether on offense or defense), the Small Forward (the team's all-rounder, with particular strengths in ballhandling and opening possible scoring opportunities from within the three-point line) and the Power Forward (similar to the Center in stature and purpose, but is normally athletic enough to move with some quickness around or within the opposing team, whether on offense or defense). In play diagrams, these individuals are often designated by numbers—point guard 1, shooting guard 2, small forward 3, power forward 4, center 5. However, the boundaries between many of these positions have become increasingly blurred in recent years, and the traditional positions themselves have become more and more antiquated, especially in the NBA. Below the professional level, many teams choose to field three or even four guards, with the remaining player(s) christened with the simple title of "frontcourt" (or colloquially "bigs"). Common positional "blurs" include:

  • Swingman or wing – Players capable of fulfilling both small forward and shooting guard responsibilities. More often than not will implement a mixture of the former two in their playstyle. Most NBA teams today will have two wings on the floor at any given time.
  • Forward-center – Almost Exactly What It Says on the Tin; almost always someone who can play power forward or center, or, similar to the aforementioned Wing, mixes their two prime positions.
  • Combo guard or lead guard – Capable of playing both guard positions. In today's NBA, many teams will have their best perimeter player as the nominal point guard, even if the same player would have been a shooting guard or small forward in an earlier time.
  • Point forward – As the name implies, a small forward who possesses strong enough ballhandling skills and general knowledge of the game's fundamentals to be able to run a team's offense and defense as a point guard. (Arguably, Nikola Jokić can be termed a point center, though that concept hasn't really taken hold in the basketball community.)
  • Stretch four – Combination of power forward and small forward. The concept is that of a power forward ("four") able to "stretch" the opposing team's defence by being able to shoot from outside the three-point line; all leagues award three points instead of the standard two for shots taken behind a designated line on the floor. A related and even more recent innovation is the "stretch five", a center who's a legitimate threat beyond the line.

There's a lot more to this than can be gone into depth - The Other Wiki has a long, detailed article on basketball's history, rules, regulations, controversies, conundrums, crowning moments, and players of note.

Competitively, basketball is played worldwide on near-all levels. However, it is most popular in North America, where it, over the past fifty years, has steadfastly been neck-and-neck with baseball for second place, after American Football; the Philippines, where it's by far the most popular sport; and the Baltics, with Latvia winning the first ever Eurobasket and hosting it in 2015, producing several European basketball and NBA stars like Jānis Krūmiņš, Maigonis Valdmanis, Valdis Muižnieks, Valdis Valters, Igors Miglinieks, Gundars Vētra, Andris Biedriņš, Kristaps Porziņģis and Dāvis Bertāns, and ASK Riga winning the EuroLeague three times in a row before becoming defunct, and Lithuania winning Eurobasket three times, hosting it twice, winning the EuroLeague once, earning 8 other medals in the Eurobasket, the World Championships and the Olympic Games, the men's national team having extremely high TV ratings with three quarters of the country's population watching their games live in 2014, and producing several NBA players, including the father-son pair of Arvydas and Domantas Sabonis, Šarūnas Marčiulionis, and Jonas Valančiūnas. The elder Sabonis and Marčiulionis are both in the Naismith Hall of Fame. Quite close behind are the Balkans, in particular Serbia, where the sport goes neck to neck with football; some of the more notable Serbian (or of Serbian origin but living elsewhere) players include Vlade Divac, Pe(d)ja Stojakovic, Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić.

International basketball is governed by FIBA (a name taken from the French acronym for "International Basketball Federation", Fédération Internationale de Basketball; pronounced FEE-ba), a body based in Switzerland.note  Near-all leagues around the world play under FIBA's rules, with the main exceptions being those based in the US. The Philippine Basketball Association uses a mashup of FIBA and NBA rules. The Basketball Tournament (TBT), a 64-team men's event held in the US during the offseason with a $1 million winner-take-all prize, uses NCAA rules with some unique modifications. That said, the rule sets aren't all that different. The main differences in the rule sets are:

  • Duration: FIBA splits its regulation games into four 10-minute quarters, as do U.S. college women's basketball and the WNBA. College men's basketball uses the originally-conceived timing structure of two 20-minute halves; the NBA and PBA use four 12-minute quarters. All of the named rule sets have 5-minute overtime periods, with the game ending only when one team has a higher score than the other at the end of an overtime period.
    • TBT uses 9-minute quarters, with a unique endgame procedure called the Elam Ending (after its inventor). For more details, see TBT's description in the "Others" folder—here, it's enough to say that it eliminates any need for overtime.
    • The NBA All-Star Game adopted the Elam Ending in 2020 but got rid of it after the 2023 edition; its method is also discussed alongside the more detailed description of TBT.
    • The NBA G League uses the NBA's timing rules with one major exception—from 2022–23, regular-season games use the aforementioned Elam Ending in overtime.
    • The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), the rule-making body for U.S. high school competition, uses 8-minute quarters with 4-minute overtimes.
  • Shot clock: 24 seconds for all professional play (except TBT), 30 seconds in college (men's and women's) and TBT. NFHS rules do not specifically mandate or prohibit a shot clock; its use or non-use is up to state-level associations. Most don't use a shot clock; before 2022–23, those that did variously opted for 30 or 35 seconds. Since 2022–23, NFHS has mandated a 35-second clock for associations that use it.
  • Fouling out: In the NBA, WNBA, PBA, and TBT, players are disqualified from the game on their sixth personal foul note . In FIBA, U.S. colleges, and NFHS, players have to commit five.
  • Size of the court: The court used in US college play and the NBA is the largest, at 94 by 50 feet (28.7 by 15.2 m). FIBA's is slightly smaller, at 28 by 15 meters (91.9 by 49.2 ft). NFHS does not mandate a specific court size, but its "optimal" court is the same width as the college/NBA court but 10 feet (3.05 m) shorter. However, some newer high schools opt for the 94-foot NCAA court, and many older schools have courts even shorter than the optimum.
  • Three-point arc: In increasing order of distance from the basket, it's NFHS, FIBA, and NBA. The PBA, WNBA, and NCAA use FIBA's arc (though in the corners, the WNBA uses the NBA arc instead of FIBA's). For most of the 2010s (and into the 2020s for women), the NCAA arc had been between the high-school and FIBA arcs. The NCAA switched to the FIBA arc in 2019–20 for Division I men's play, 2020–21 for men's play in other divisions, and 2021–22 for all women's play.
  • The rule sets also have subtle differences that affect when teams get to shoot free throws instead of putting the ball back into play, with a new shot clock where applicable. (If a player is fouled while shooting, he or she always gets to shoot free throws—one if the basket was made, and two or three if the basket attempt was missed.) While these differences are too involved for this page, suffice it to say that they can significantly affect late-game strategies.

Professional Basketball in America: The NBA

Owing to it being the nation where the sport was created, the United States is where all the top basketball talent in the world goes: it's where the spectators and the money are. As such, the NBA is without dispute the best and most popular basketball league in the world. The section on the NBA got so long and unwieldy that we gave the league its own page.

Other Popular Basketball Leagues

    Basketball Around the World 
The NBA is so famous around the world that fans tend to forget that there are basketball leagues in other countries. Here is a list of other countries with a strong basketball presence.

  • Lithuania: A former Soviet Republic where basketball seems to be the only sport practiced. Some famous NBA players were born here, including LeBron's buddy Žydrūnas Ilgauskas, and the legendary Arvydas Sabonis (7'3"), who could have been the best player ever if he hadn't often been injured.note  A few other Lithuanians, among them Arvydas' son Domantas, play in the NBA; many others play in major European teams. The domestic league is usually a battle between Žalgiris, the elder Sabonis' old club from Kaunas, and Rytas, from the capital city of Vilnius.
  • Spain: Won the 2006 World Championship (now World Cup), 2009, 2013, and 2022 European Championships, and 2019 World Cup. Have reached at least the semifinals in the last 11 EuroBasket editions, and lost against the U.S.A. in the last two Olympic finals. Country of Pau Gasol, recently retired Catalonia-born forward with multiple NBA teams, most notably the Memphis Grizzlies and Los Angeles Lakers; his brother, Marc Gasol, ex-forward-center of the Lakers, Grizzlies, and Toronto Raptors, now winding down his playing career back home in Spain; 2019 World Cup MVP Ricky Rubio, now with the Cleveland Cavaliers; and Serge Ibaka (born in the Republic of the Congo, but naturalized in Spain), shot-blocking wizard for the Milwaukee Bucks who made his name with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Spain's domestic league, Liga ACB,note  is often considered the world's top league outside the NBA, with three especially prominent teams: the basketball squads of Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, plus standalone basketball club Baskonia.
  • Greece: Another major country. Two major teams (Panathinaikos and Olympiacos' basketball clubs) fight every year for the conquest of the local title (like they do in pretty much every other sport both are involved, in fact) and are top contenders on the continental level, having won nine EuroLeagues together. Greek supporters really are hot. Treated former Atlanta Hawks and current Phoenix Suns player Josh Childress as a god when he went to Greece to play for Olympiacos. Currently, the country's best-known player is the Bucks' "Greek Freak", Giannis Antetokounmpo.note 
    • Their national basketball team is no slouch, either: a Dark Horse Victory (beating both Yugoslavia and the USSR) in the 1987 European Championship, which was hosted in Greece, created a frenzy that solidified basketball as a major sport in the country. Sure enough, after one-and-a-half decades of near-misses, Greece won the European Championship again in 2005 and got the Silver medal next year in the **World** Championship, although everybody remembers the semi-final win against the US.
  • Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia: Formerly known altogether as Yugoslavia, they are, along with Team USA, the most successful team in Basketball World Cups, each with 5 golds. Always have a tough national team, and they are able to beat almost anybody, even after the collapse of the original country. Home to players like Darko Miličić, Peja Stojaković, Goran Dragić, and Luka Dončić, known for their tenacity and accuracy beyond the three-point line. Slovenia won a surprise EuroBasket title in 2017 behind Dragić (who had previously announced this would be his international finale) and then-teenage sensation Dončić, and Serbia finished second at the 2023 World Cup despite two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić sitting out.
    • While they were still Yugoslavia, their team was dominated by close friends Vlade Divac (a Serb) and Dražen Petrović (a Croat) who were later both signed to the NBA, but after the split of Yugoslava and Divac throwing a Croatian flagnote , the two stopped talking and Divac was never able to patch up his relationship with Petrović before Petrović died in a car accident in Germany.
  • Italy & France: Countries with ups and downs. Italy was the silver medal winner in the 2004 Olympics, losing to Argentina in the Gold Medal game. France, the silver medalists in Tokyo 2020/21, is currently the nationality second most represented in the NBA (after the USA itself). Tony Parker is also famous for his wife ex-wife, and Joakim Noah (born in New York City and mostly raised in the US) is also famous for his dad, former tennis star Yannick Noah. However, with both now retired, the current faces of French basketball are the "Stifle Tower", three-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert, and teenage mega-prospect Victor Wembanyama.
  • Russia/Soviet Union: As often in sport. The most famous Russian player, the now-retired Andrei Kirilenko, best known for his long tenure with the Utah Jazz, is known to love puns: he chose number 47 because of his initials.
  • Angola: Angola is the dominant country in African basketball, as is...
  • Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico being dominant in Central American basketball. Their greatest feat was in the 2004 Olympics where they soundly beat seemingly unbeatable Team USA in the group stage.
    • Puerto Rico is a US territory and people born there are automatically US citizens. It came as no surprise to astute observers that a Puerto Rican basketball team could go toe-to-toe with one from the rest of the US.
  • Argentina: Dominates the sport in South America—or at least did until the core players from their heyday in the early 21st century got old, though they're still no pushovers, as evidenced by a silver medal at the 2019 World Cup. Was the first world champion, and grabbed the Olympic gold in Athens 2004. Were FIBA's #1 after the Beijing Olympics, but now are #4. Better known for Hall of Famer Manu Ginóbili, who won four NBA titles with the San Antonio Spurs, led the 2004 gold-medal team, and also made it into the World Championship All-Tournament team twice, in 2002 and 2006.
    • Before Argentina, there was Brazil: A potency in the 1950s and 1960s, with two World Championships and two Olympic bronzes (plus a third in 1948). In the '80s and '90s, it was the team of Oscar Schmidt, who holds the world record for points scored with 49,702note , many of them thanks to his three-point shooting proficiency. But the team has struggled since Schmidt's retirement in 1996, specially because volleyball started to take basketball's popularity in Brazil. However, the country brought out some good NBA players in Nenê, Leandro Barbosa, Anderson Varejão and Tiago Splitternote , and they qualified for the 2012 Olympics after three non-appearances - in which Brazil nearly trumped rival Argentina in the quarterfinals.
  • Germany: "Discovered" basketball with the Dallas Mavericks' Dirk Nowitzki (though there was Detlef Schrempf before him, Nowitzki managed to overshadow his notability); developed into a regular team before taking a serious level in badass in the 2020s, winning the 2023 World Cup.
  • Turkey: They may have only four or five notable teams found in this country (Anadolu Efes and Fenerbahçe usually being the big two, with Beşiktaş gaining some recent notice due to them grabbing big-name NBA players like Allen Iverson and Deron Williams, and Galatasaray and Karşıyaka also picking up recent titles), but they also have some good players that came from there like Hedo Türkoğlu, Mehmet Okur, Ersan İlyasova, Ömer Aşık, Semih Erden, and recent Turk Enes Kanter Freedom*. Basically, they gained interest in basketball starting in 2001 when they got a silver medal in the European Tournament and will more likely than not gain more interest with another silver medal while being the hosts for the 2010 FIBA World Championships.
  • Israel: Or, should we say, Maccabi Tel Aviv. Historically the best team on the Israeli league by far (with 49 state championships!), Maccabi has 6 European championships, a highly devoted fanbase, and a reputation as "the country's team" (of course, it helps them that the Israeli national team kinda sucks). Naturally, the other teams don't like Maccabi. The first Israeli player to play the NBA is Omri Casspi, who played for Sacramento before a last-minute (er, last-pre-lockout-day) trade forced him to move to Cleveland.
  • China: China has a few professional leagues, but the most popular is the Chinese Basketball Associationnote . They had a few players from China's CBA playing in the NBA, such as the first Chinese NBA player Wang Zhizhi (of Bayi), first Chinese NBA starter and NBA Finals champion Mengke Bateernote , and Yi Jianlian (from Guangdong), but the best one to come out of there was Yao Ming, a former player and current owner of the CBA's Shanghai Sharks. The NBA gained many Chinese fans from Yao Ming playing in Houston, but when Yao announced his retirement in 2011, some of those same fans no longer bothered with that league. The best two teams from their CBA are the Bayi (Army Shanglu) Rockets and the Guangdong (Winnerway Hongyuan) Southern Tigers, the latter of which always makes it to the playoffs. Aside from the two years when Yao's Shanghai Sharks or Stephon Marbury's Beijing Ducks won it all, it's always either Bayi or the Southern Tigers that end up winning it all in that league. You could say that those two teams are like the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers of China. The CBA gained notice internationally when former NBA All-Stars — and polarizing players — Stephon Marbury, Steven Francis, Tracy McGrady, and Gilbert Arenas all went to the CBA after they were unable to find NBA teams who would hire them, joined by some NBA players who went to the CBA during the lockout. Since China knew about their situation, they installed a new rule where any (non-Chinese) NBA player who enters the CBA will stay there for the rest of their season — sometime in February or March, depending on where teams place. China's considered the best basketball country in Asia, but when the Chinese end up coming together for some FIBA World or Olympic challenges... let's just say they don't stack up all that well when compared to other countries. And at the continental level, they now have to tangle with Australia, since FIBA now holds a single regional championship for its Asia and Oceania zones. The first combined continental men's championship in 2017 was won by the Aussies.
    • A key note is that in China's state-directed sports system, athletes are chosen from a very young age and sent to sports academies—for instance, Yao Ming was selected at age nine. With very few exceptions, only the graduates of the sports academies are allowed to go into professional sports in the PRC. One of the main problems with this vis-a-vis basketball is that the Chinese academies seem to think that "tall=good at basketball", meaning that many talented players never get a chance to play simply because they aren't flat-out giants. Jeremy Lin, at 6'3", would never have been considered if he had been born in, say, Zhejiang (where his maternal grandmother was born) rather than Los Angeles.note  On the flip side, some people get picked for the academies who just aren't cut out to play pro basketball; even some who would be qualified can't handle the pressure of the academy system and burn out before they hit the big time. Between these two factors, Chinese basketball suffers greatly.
  • Australia: Basketball gained considerable popularity in the early '90s, with Michael Jordan being named as young Australians' favourite sportsman (to the alarm of some people who didn't like the fact that an American got top spot) and the local National Basketball League airing on prime-time TV. After Jordan's retirement, it declined in popularity, with several NBL teams merging or folding, including the Sydney Kings and Brisbane Bullets, which left the league without teams in two of the country's three largest cities (although the Kings eventually made a comeback). It remains popular at grass-roots level, though. Notable Australian basketballers include former stars Luc Longley and Andrew Gaze, and present stars Patty Mills (the first Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islandernote  to win an NBA championship), Andrew Bogut (who briefly returned to the NBA to close out the 2018–19 season after being named NBL MVP), Joe Ingles, Ben Simmons, and Josh Giddey. Also, the Australia squad for the 2014 FIBA World Cup featured five players who were either already in the NBA or signed with a team for the following season. Emerging superstar Kyrie Irving was born in Australia while his father was playing in the NBL, but his parents (both Americans) returned stateside when he was two years old, and he's playing international ball for Team USA. Notably, the Australian men's basketball system is surprisingly well-integrated with that of the US—all of the Aussies named in this section except Ingles and Giddey played college ball in the States, and Simmons is the Australia-born son of an American player.
    • National team-wise, the male "Boomers" have nothing on the female "Opals". The Australian women – which have included past WNBA stars Lauren Jackson, Penny Taylor, and Sandy Brondello (now the Opals' head coach) and recent WNBA star Liz Cambage – won medals in all Olympics from 1996 to 2012, and the 2006 World Championship.
  • Philippines: the Philippines is a basketball-mad country, owing largely to it being a former colony of the United States. You can find a basketball court just about anywhere, and basketball at the college and high school levels have the same fervor one can find with the US NCAA. The Philippines prides itself with having Asia's first professional basketball league — the Philippine Basketball Association, which is the second oldest pro league after the NBA. The PBA is composed entirely of corporate teams: i.e., instead of the team name being based on their home city like NBA clubs, PBA clubs have team names such as Toyota (the auto maker) or San Miguel (beer and food). The country also has the semipro Philippine Basketball League (PBL) and the PBA's own in-house D-League, as well as now-defunct leagues that either preceded the PBA, or were competing against it.
    • The Philippines is a major power within Southeast Asia (ASEAN), having won the gold medal in almost every Southeast Asian regional meet. They were also a major player in the much wider Asian basketball tournaments in the 1960s to early 1970s, though they were gradually overtaken by China and other nations. The Philippine national team has finally managed to climb back to its former position as a major power when they were able to end the country's Asian medal drought with a silver medal finish at the 2013 FIBA Asian Championship.
    • Suffering a major setback because of level of play, Filipino-Americans who can't crack the NBA or even the NBA G League go to the PBA to continue playing, and those same players are being used to compete internationally.
  • Also of note is the EuroLeague, basketball's equivalent to the UEFA Champions League. Although it began under the control of FIBA's European section, it's been operated by the big European clubs throughout this century. The competition involves 18 teams, 13 of which are shareholders in the competition's governing body, Euroleague Basketball (not in camel case); those numbers had been 16 and 11 before 2021–22. The other five consist of four invited teams, based on performance in domestic leagues, plus the winner of the previous season of Euroleague Basketball's second-tier EuroCup (analogous to football's Europa League). Since the 2016–17 edition, these teams play a full home-and-away league, with the top four teams advancing to the Final Four, run in the same manner as the NCAA version except that the EuroLeague still plays a third-place game. The 13 long-term licensees are:
    • France: ASVEL (from Lyon); added in 2021–22
    • Germany: Bayern Munich, also added in 2021–22
    • Greece: Olympiacos, Panathinaikos
    • Israel: Maccabi Tel Aviv
    • Italy: Olimpia Milano
    • Lithuania: Žalgiris
    • Russia: CSKA Moscow (currently banned from play due to the country's 2022 invasion of Ukraine)
    • Spain: Baskonia, FC Barcelona, Real Madrid
    • Turkey: Anadolu Efes, Fenerbahçe

The main national championships are the FIBA Basketball World Cup (renamed from "World Championship" after the 2010 edition) for men, the FIBA Women's Basketball World Cup (renamed from "World Championship for Women" after the 2014 edition), and the Summer Olympics for both sexes. All but one of the most recent editions of each championship were won by Team USA—the 2022 Women's World Cup in Australia and both competitions at the 2020 (21) Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Germany won the 2023 men's World Cup, held mainly in the Philippines with matches also in Indonesia and Japan; Team USA finished fourth after enough NBA superstars to fill a squad passed on the event. (The US did achieve its main goal of an Olympic berth, qualifying as one of the top two teams from FIBA's Americas zone.) The next Summer Olympics will be in 2024 in Paris; the next Women's World Cup in 2026 will be hosted by Germany, with all matches in Berlin; and the next men's World Cup will be in Qatar in 2027.

    College Basketball 

Like American football, basketball took shape in colleges and universities, and as such, was once the biggest draw until the pro game took over, with the college game still having an appeal unique to the pros. From the huge arena to the small gymnasium, fans cheer for their teams, the school bands play music, and mascots do their thing. Experiences vary per institution attended.

Games are divided into two 20-minute halves (for men only; the women's game was changed to four 10-minute quarters in 2015–16), the shot clock was shortened from 35 seconds to 30 for the 2015–16 seasonnote  (hence the relatively low scoring), and each team is given four timeouts in a gamenote . Since the 2020–21 season, all of college men's basketball has used the FIBA three-point line (in 2019–20, only NCAA Division I men used FIBA's arc). The women's arc remained shorter than the FIBA or NBA arcs until 2021–22, when the FIBA arc was adopted. The style of play and the overall feeling of watching a game are refreshingly different.

Most American players in the NBA, along with some foreigners, played in college before going pro. In the late '90s and early '00s, however, there was a trend for many players to declare for the draft right after high school. To prevent this, the NBA made a rule in 2005 that all players must be 19 or older during the calendar year of the draft, and additionally players (of any nationality) who complete high school in the U.S., or enroll in a U.S. college or university, must be one year out of high school before entering the draft. It's debatable whether this is for better or for worse.

There are 1,400-or-so four-year colleges in the United Statesnote  who field varsity basketball teams. Around 1,100 of them are members of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), which splits its membership into three divisions. Most of the rest belong to the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics). About 360 schools' teams make up NCAA Division I, the top level of college basketball.note  Essentially all of themnote  play in one of 32 conferences. After each team has played somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 games each season, each conference has its own tournament, and the champion of each conference tournament is assured a place in the NCAA tournament... with a major exception noted in the next paragraph. Through the 2015–16 season, the Ivy League granted its automatic bid to the team with the best record,note  but the Ivies started holding their own conference tournament in 2016–17.

About that exception... a team must be eligible for postseason play in order to receive that automatic bid. A team can be ineligible for one of two reasons:

  • First, the team is ineligible due to NCAA-imposed sanctions. That said, conferences pretty much always bar such teams from their tournaments, and even if that team is allowed in the conference tournament, the conference will have an alternate plan for the autobid (either the loser in the title game, or the regular-season champion).
  • The second reason is if the team represents a school that is transitioning from a lower NCAA division (almost always Division II) to Division I. Such a transition requires four years,* during which time the school is barred from NCAA-sponsored postseason play—either the NCAA men's or women's tournament, the men's NIT, or the newly launched (women's) WBIT. This issue has arisen four times so far in the 2020s, twice for each sex:
    • First, in 2021, California Baptist, in its third transitional season, won the WAC women's regular-season and tournament titles... unbeaten. The NCAA autobid went to Utah Valley, which finished second in the WAC regular season. The Lancers ended up in the Women's NIT (which, unlike the men's version, is NOT run by the NCAA), where they lost in the quarterfinals to eventual champion Rice.
    • The next season, Bellarmine, a second-year transitional school out of Louisville, won the ASUN men's tournament (though not unbeaten, unlike the CBU women in 2021). The NCAA autobid went to regular-season champ Jacksonville State. The Knights petitioned the NCAA for a waiver to play in the NIT, but after it was turned down, they rejected bids to two other tournaments and sat out the postseason entirely.
    • The season after that, Merrimack, a Massachusetts school in the final year of its own D-I transition, won both the regular-season and tournament championships in the Northeast Conference. The NCAA autobid went to the Warriors' opponent in the NEC title game, Fairleigh Dickinson... which would make its own tournament history (read further down the page).
    • In 2024, Southern Indiana, in the second year of its transition, won the Ohio Valley Conference's regular-season women's title by six games. The Screaming Eagles earned a bye into the tournament semifinals, and romped through the rest of the tournament, winning the semifinal by 15 and the final by 28. The NCAA autobid went to the UT Martin team that USI had wiped the floor with in the final.

The biggest part of college basketball is the special feeling that sweeps the nation for the NCAA tournament, a time and a feeling known as March Madness. Also known as The Big Dance, it is commonly considered the first major sporting even in the American sports calendar after the Super Bowlnote  and sometimes winds up being even more of a party since the tournament is spread across three weeks. As is the case with other sports postseasons, this is when teams get by far the most attention they will get all year. Since 1987, the championship game even has its own television closing theme song, "One Shining Moment" which accompanies a montage of memorable events across the tournament as the credits roll.

Throughout The '60s and The '70s the NCAA tournament was only open to conference champions and a few highly-ranked independent schools, with a total field of around two dozen teams. Eventually everyone recognized that this restriction was leaving a lot of good teams out of the tournament. In particular, the plights of USC in 1971 (the Trojans finished 24–2 and were clearly the second best team in the country, but UCLA's dynasty was in full gear and they took the Pac-8 title) and Maryland in 1974 (ranked #4 in the country, the Terrapins had nowhere to go after a crushing overtime loss in the ACC tournament title game against NC State) helped spur the NCAA to start handing out at-large bids. 1975 saw the NCAA field expand to 32 teams, a move that solidified it as the premier postseason tournament, demoting the NIT (see below) to also-ran status. Since 2011, the base of the tournament structure has involved up to 68 teamsnote  divided into four groups and seeded within each group. Number 1 plays number 16, 2 plays 15, and so on. The tournament added a play-in game, in which two small schools play for a 16th seed, in 2001. Since 2011, there has been a new series of four games, the First Four, held in Dayton, Ohio (except for the first post-COVID tournament in 2021, when the NCAA moved the entire tournament to Indiana).note  Two of the games feature the four lowest-ranked conference champions playing for #16 seeds. The other two involve the four lowest-ranked at-large entries; they most often play for #11 seeds (18 times through 2024), though they have played for #10 (twice, both in 2024), #12 (four times), #13 (once), and #14 seeds (once). Confused yet here?

After 68 teams are chosen to play selected and seeded, the announcement of the field is made one Sunday in mid-March on CBS, it's time for people from across America from all walks of life—up to and including a certain former presidentnote —to pick the teams they think will win each game by "filling out the bracket." This is done for fun, but some play betting games and hold office pools, which the NCAA (officially) looks down on. The study of the bracket is often referred to as "bracketology".

The first two rounds (which were called the second and third rounds from 2011–2015) are hosted by eight different cities, including some with NBA teams, in traditional arenas. Four more cities host "regionals", consisting of the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, and one more hosts the Final Four, which consists of the semifinals and the championship game.note  Nowadays, the Final Four is always hosted by a city with an indoor football stadium converted to host a basketball game with 70,000+ seats. During the first decade or so of the 21st century, there was a trend toward also holding at least one regional at such a stadium. However, the trend now is to hold the regionals in traditional arenas; the only regionals to have been held at football stadiums since 2016 were two of the 2021 regionals, which were moved to the Indianapolis Colts' Lucas Oil Stadium amid COVID-19. And even then, all four of the 2021 regionals were originally planned for traditional arenas. The only post-2016 regional originally scheduled for a football stadium was one in the 2020 tournament that was canceled due to COVID. From 1946 to 1981, there was also a third-place game, and until 1975 each regional also had a third-place game.

While the NCAA tournament is the sport's official championship, there are some other postseason events. Most notable among these is the National Invitation Tournament (NIT), which is actually one year older than the NCAA tournament (the first NIT was 1938, the first NCAA was 1939*). It had been run outside of NCAA control until the NCAA bought it in 2006. For the first part of its history, all NIT games were played at Madison Square Garden in New York City, which gave schools important media exposure in the era before widespread television coverage of sports. Up until the end of The '50s, the NIT was considered the equal of the NCAA tournament, but as the NCAA tournament started expanding, the NIT's importance gradually faded, and it became a tournament for teams not quite good enough to make the Big Dance. The NIT started expanding as well, finally settling on 32 teams, with early rounds played at home arenas, while the semifinals and championship game were still at Madison Square Garden through 2022. (Again, except in 2021, when the NCAA reduced the field to 16 and moved the tournament to Dallas–Fort Worth.) The NCAA has announced that for at least the 2023 and 2024 editions, the NIT semifinals and final would not be in NYC; Las Vegas hosted in 2023 and Indianapolis will do so in 2024. The 2024 edition will see a major change to the NIT selection process—the NCAA has scrapped its recent practice of giving an automatic NIT invite to any conference champion that fails to win its conference tournament and doesn't make the NCAA field. Instead, the consensus top six conferences in men's basketball (the Power Five Conferences plus the Big East) receive two autobids each, which go to the top two teams from each league that don't make the NCAA tournament (as determined by the computer ranking the NCAA uses as its primary tournament selection tool)... regardless of regular-season record.note  The remaining 20 teams are selected on a purely at-large basis, with deference given to NCAA's official "first four out" (i.e., the four teams that were atop the selection committee's ranking of teams that didn't get in the Big Dance). The 12 automatic qualifiers, plus the top four teams from the remaining 20 entrants, host first-round games. The NIT champ is sometimes derisively called the "69th best team in the country".note  There's also the College Basketball Invitational, featuring 16 teams with all games at a single venue; that event invites members of power conferences sometimes, but in the past few years none of them have shown up. Two other postseason tournaments have been played in this century, but both have gone belly-up. The Basketball Classic, an effective 2022 rebranding of the CollegeInsider.com Postseason Tournament (normally 32 teams; made a point of not even inviting teams from major conferences), wasn't renewed after its 2022 edition. The Vegas 16 (which had an 8-team field but was aiming for 16), tried to revive the old NIT format of all games at a single venue, but folded after only one edition in 2016. Collectively, they are pretty much college basketball's equivalent to those otherwise non-important bowl games whose only purpose are to give ESPN something to do in mid-December. The majority of fans never take them seriously, and teams turn down those bids regularly. The NIT is generally considered to be the best of these tournaments, and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane have frequently promoted their two NIT wins as being part of their "championship tradition". Some recent Cinderella runs in the NIT (Cal State Bakersfield making the semifinals in 2017, Lipscomb making the championship game in 2019) have brought some renewed attention to that tournament. The COVID-19 pandemic scuttled the 2020 editions of all of these events and also scuttled the 2021 CIT.

D-I women have two (or maybe three) alternate tournaments as well. In 2023, the NCAA finally launched a direct counterpart to the men's NIT in the form of the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament (WBIT), whose first edition will be held in 2024. Like the men's NIT, the WBIT will feature 32 teams and will be directly run by the NCAA. It will give an automatic invitation to any conference champion that fails to make the NCAA tournament (unless ineligible, like Southern Indiana in 2024), a practice the NCAA abandoned for the men's NIT in 2023–24. The Women's National Invitation Tournament (WNIT) had been the acknowledged second-tier women's postseason event before the launch of the WBIT. With the WBIT now getting first dibs of teams that didn't make the Big Dance, the WNIT will drop from 64 teams to 48 in 2024. Unlike the men's NIT, the WNIT, established in 1998, has never been run by the NCAA. Before the reduction to a 48-team field, the WNIT had a slightly different structure from the men's equivalent, with all 32 Division I conferences having at least one guaranteed bid to the tournament, plus 32 at-large bids. The organizers of the WNIT haven't announced how that tournament will fill its field going forward. A third tournament run outside of direct NCAA control has been the Women's Basketball Invitational (WBI), launched in 2010 and featuring 8 teams, but it remains to be seen whether it will continue after the addition of the WBIT.

NCAA Divisions II and III also have 64-team championship tournaments for both men and women (though the 2020 editions were also canceled due to COVID-19; in 2021, the D-III tournaments were canceled and the D-II events dropped to 48 teams). Division II's is divided into 8 regional sections hosted by the top team in the region, and the 8 winners go to a neutral site for the final rounds. Division III does geographically-based early rounds, with a neutral-site Final Four. NAIA basketball was divided into two divisions from 1992 to 2020, with each holding a 32-team tournament with all games hosted at a single site. Kansas City has hosted the NAIA Division I men's tournament every year since 1937, except two with no tournament (1944 during World War II and 2020 due to COVID-19) and eight years (1994-2001) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. To fit 8 games into a single day for the first round of the NAIA tournament, the first game tipped off at 9:00 A.M., while the last game started after 10:00 P.M.! However, beginning in 2021, the NAIA returned to a single division, with a 64-team tournament, and only the final 16 teams get a chance to play in Kansas City. The NAIA women's tournament was first held in 1981, a year before the first NCAA tournament. It started out with 8 teams, expanding to 16 and 32 before going to the two-division model at the same time the men did. The NAIA's 2021 change to a single-division model was also applied to the women, with the same 64-team bracket. Unlike the men, the women have not had a single permanent site, though the D-I tournament did spend nearly 20 years in Jackson, Mississippi (1992–2011) and the D-II event was in Sioux City, Iowa from 1998 until the return to a single division. The reunified women's tournament now ends with the final 16 playing in Sioux City.

Prominent programs in the NCAA historically include, but are not limited to, these teams. These are the eight who have (officially) won at least three NCAA tournaments. (The Louisville Cardinals had also won three but were stripped of their 2013 title after the NCAA found that a program staffer had paid a local madam thousands of dollars to provide strippers and prostitutes to players and recruits over a four-year period that included the championship team.)

  • Duke Blue Devils — UNC's most geographically direct and most vehemently hated rivals, they were coached from 1980 to 2022 by Mike Krzyzewski ("shi-shef-skee"note ), often referred to as Coach K.note  In 2015, Coach K became the first men's head coach with 1,000 career NCAA Division I wins.note  With just four Final Four appearances before Coach K came to Durham, they made it 13 times during his tenure, including five national championships... though his final game was a loss to North Carolina in the 2022 Final Four.note  Duke players (Christian Laettner of the Dream Team, Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Jason Williams, JJ Redick) aren't superstars in the NBA, though, with the notable exceptions of Mr. Nice Guy Grant Hill, Kyrie Irving (who only spent one year at the school),note  and Zion Williamson. Former Duke player Jon Scheyer, who had been Coach K's top assistant, is now trying to continue the tradition Coach K built.
  • Indiana Hoosiers — Five-time national champions, they are famous for having been coached from 1972 to 2000 by Bob Knight, who coached them to three of those titles. The first of Knight's title teams, that of 1976, is also the most recent D-I men's team to complete an unbeaten season. Knight is as well-known for getting his charges through school as well as his Hair-Trigger Temper. Indiana's trophy winners at the college level included Scott May and Calbert Cheaney. IU hasn't done a lot in women's basketball, but the Hoosier women have one very notable alum—Tara VanDerveer, longtime coach of women's powerhouse Stanford.
  • Kansas Jayhawks — Arguably the team most intimately connected with the sport's history. The team's very first coach was James Naismith... yes, the very same James Naismith mentioned at the top of this page. Ironically, he was the only Jayhawks head coach to finish his Kansas career with a losing record. Four of their head coaches are in the Hall of Fame in that role—Phog Allen (the namesake of their arena), Larry Brown, former North Carolina coach Roy Williams, and current Jayhawks head coach Bill Self. (Naismith is in the Hall as a contributor.) Players? Just to name a few: Clyde Lovellette, Wilt Chamberlain, Jo Jo White, and Paul Pierce are in the Hall, and other past Jayhawks stars include Danny Manning and Joel Embiid. And that doesn't even get into players who went on to make their mark in coaching, with Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith (whom we'll get to soon) being the most notable. Besides their four NCAA championship titles ('52, '88, '08, '22), here are just some of the program's records going into the 2024 NCAA tournament:
    • Longest streak of NCAA Tournament appearances: 34
      • The COVID-19-induced cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Tournament interrupted, but didn't end, the streak. The Jayhawks would likely have been the #1 overall seed had the tournament been played.
    • Most winning seasons in Division I history: 100 (also the most seasons at .500 or better, with 103)
    • Most regular-season conference championships in Division I history: 64
    • Most consecutive regular-season conference championships in Division I (men's) history: 14 (2005–18)
    • Most consecutive weeks ranked in the AP Poll: 231 (February 2, 2009–February 1, 2021)
    • Before being forced to vacate 15 wins from the 2017–18 season due to fielding an ineligible player, it had the most wins, with 2,385 at the end of 2022–23. (Counting the reduction, they're at 2,392 going into the 2024 NCAA tournament.) The Jayhawks are now second to the next team on our list...
  • Kentucky Wildcats — Coached by the great Adolph Rupp, aka "The Baron of the Bluegrass", from 1931–72. Won eight NCAA tournaments, including four under Rupp, and have appeared in more NCAA tournaments than any other program. Three of those titles came in just four seasons (1948–51). Two years after the third, the team was forced to suspend operations for a full year due to several of its players being implicated in the CCNY point shaving scandal; while the other six programs punished by this scandal never fully recovered from the NCAA's "death penalty", Kentucky was almost unfazed. The Wildcats are the only program to have won national titles under five different coaches—Rupp, his successor Joe B. Hall, Rick Pitino, Tubby Smith, and current coach John Calipari. They were the program that lost the 1966 final to the considerably less prestigious Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso, or UTEP), and that's the story in the movie Glory Road. Before being passed by Kansas during the 2022 NCAA tournament, they were the all-time winningest team in college basketball, but reclaimed that distinction after KU was forced to vacate most of its 2017–18 wins. The Cats have also won more Southeastern Conference titles than any of the other teams... combined. The Kentucky women's team had been making some strides as well, briefly interrupted by off-court turmoil in 2015–16, though they've so far had a bad case of Every Year They Fizzle Out. The Kentucky women however did manage to achieve an incredible feat when they upset top-ranked (and eventual national champ) South Carolina in the 2022 SEC Women's Basketball Tournament Final by the score of 64–62.note 
  • North Carolina Tar Heels — First and foremost, famous for being Michael Jordan's alma mater. The Tar Heels are six-time NCAA champions; Dean Smith, their coach from 1962–97, coached them to two of those, and Roy Williams, their coach from 2003–21, led them to three. The Heels had the longest streak ever of consecutive NCAA tournament appearances at 27, making every tournament from 1975-2001, before Kansas passed them in 2017. In 2022, under first-year coach (and former Heels player) Hubert Davis, Carolina not only ended Coach K's career in the NCAA tournament, but also spoiled his final home game at Duke. The Carolina women have one national title to their credit (1994).
  • UCLA Bruins — In their prime, Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) or Bill Walton was playing. The late, great John Wooden coached this team from 1949 to 1975. The Bruins hold the (men's) record for longest winning streak: 88 games from 1971 to 1974, with Walton among them. They had a couple of long winning streaks in the future Kareem's time there, too. But more importantly, they have eleven NCAA championships, ten of which were won in Wooden's last twelve seasons as coach.
  • UConn Huskies — The reigning NCAA champion. Representing the University of Connecticut, the Huskies men were a regional power in New England for many decades, and the school was also a founding member of the original Big East Conference in 1979. However, UConn didn't become a national name until the 1990s under coach Jim Calhoun. After falling short of the Final Four throughout that decade, they broke through in 1999, not only reaching the Final Four but also claiming the national title. They went on to win two more titles in '04 and '11 under Calhoun. After he retired just before the 2012–13 season, he was replaced by his top assistant (and former UConn player) Kevin Ollie. After being barred from the '13 tournament for academic reasons, and being left behind in the conference realignment shuffle of the early 2010s,note  they picked up a fourth national title in 2014 before falling into a dry spell, leading to Ollie's replacement by Dan Hurley, a member of a prominent coaching family. The Huskies revived their (men's) fortunes with a move to the reconfigured Big East in 2020, followed by a fifth natty in '23. Among their star players are Ray Allen and Richard "Rip" Hamilton (the latter a star on the first championship team). As strong as UConn is in men's basketball, it's even stronger in women's basketball. Led by coach Geno Auriemma, the Huskiesnote  have won 11 national titles.note  This makes UConn the only school whose men's and women's teams have both won multiple D-I national titles. Among their rivals in both versions of the Big East are the...
  • Villanova Wildcats — One of Philadelphia's "Big Five" basketball programs,note  Nova has been a power in the region for decades, regularly making NCAA appearances, but made their first major splash in 1971, losing in the championship game to UCLA... though that result would be wiped from the record books when it came out that their biggest star had signed a pro contract during that season. The Wildcats' first championship in 1985 was one of the biggest shocks in NCAA tournament history this side of UMBC over Virginia or Fairleigh Dickinson over Purdue (see below), with Nova stunning heavily favored Big East rival Georgetown thanks to shooting nearly 80% from the field in the final. Nova reached new heights in this century under HC Jay Wright, winning its second national title in 2016 over North Carolina on a buzzer-beating three-pointer and its third in 2018 in dominant fashion, winning all of their tournament games by double digits. However, in a far more stunning move than that of Coach K, Wright retired after the 2021–22 season.note 

Honorable mention goes to the Michigan State Spartans and Gonzaga Bulldogsnote , which, with the aforementioned Jayhawks, are in the midst of the three longest current March Madness appearance streaks (at 34 for the Jayhawks, 26 for the Spartans, and 25 for the Bulldogs).note  Michigan State has ten Final Fours and six Big Ten tournament championships, but have only won it all twice.note  In spite of this, they have done well under the leadership of coach Tom Izzo for nearly 30 years and often make at least the Sweet Sixteen.

As for Gonzaga, even though it hasn't won a national titlenote , it gets special status for two reasons: First, it's a quite small Catholic school in Eastern Washington that plays in the decidedly mid-major West Coast Conference.note  Second, it's done it without the benefit of any revenue from football (Gonzaga hasn't had a football team since 1941).note  The Zags are also the most recent D-I men's team to enter the tournament unbeaten, doing so in 2021... though they had to recover from a beatdown by Baylor in that season's title game. They got the top overall seed in 2022 anyway, but that season further cemented their recent status as a victim of Every Year They Fizzle Out, going down in the Sweet Sixteen.

Another special honorable mention goes to the 1965-66 Texas Western Miners (now the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP) for being the first (and for more than a decade only) college men's team to ever get into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (mainly due to the fact they were the first all-black starting team to ever win the NCAA Tournament). Another such mention should go to the second college men's team to enter the Hall: the 1957–1959 Tennessee A&I Tigers (now Tennessee State University), a historically black institution in Nashville; the Tigers won NAIA titles in the listed years, becoming the first HBCU to win a national championship and the first school to win three straight national titles at any level.note 

Three final special honorable mentions go out to the UMBC Retrieversnote , the Saint Peter's Peacocks, and the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights. In 2018, UMBC became the first #16 seed ever to defeat a #1 seed in the men's tournament, dominating the Virginia Cavaliers, never trailing in the second half on their way to a 20-point win. So honorable a mention, in fact, the fine folks at The Other Wiki had a page on the game within mere hours of it ending. As for Saint Peter's, the small Catholic school out of Jersey City became the first #15 seed ever to make a regional final in 2022, notably taking down #2 seed Kentucky in the first round before running into a buzzsaw named North Carolina one step shy of a Final Four trip. The following year, FDU became the second #16 seed to take down a #1, this time Purdue (TOW also had a page on that game within hours). In some ways, FDU's win was even more of an upset: it only made the 2023 tournament because Merrimack was ineligible (see above), had to win a First Four game two nights before to earn the #16 seed, and had the shortest roster in all of Division I while Purdue was led by the consensus national player of the year in the 7'4" Zach Edey.note 

Women's college basketball

Then there's the women's game. Before the WNBA, it was the premier showcase of female hoopsters outside the Olympics. The women's game really started to emerge in the '70s, and in 1982, the NCAA— hey, where are you going? Get back here! This could be useful!

While women's basketball isn't nearly as lucrative as its male counterpart, it is still quite popular. Women students have been playing ball practically from the invention of the sport itself, making basketball likely the oldest women's team sport. Basic differences between the men's game and the women's game, besides the sex of the players, include a smaller ball and (at some levels) a closer three-point arc. On the college level, teams will occasionally have "Lady" appended to the team name, sometimes to the point of absurdity (ahem, University of South Carolina "Lady Gamecocks") or a feminine form of the team name (Cowgirls instead of Cowboys). However, the clear trend in this area is for men's and women's teams to use the same nickname. In fact, the aforementioned South Carolina dropped "Lady" from its women's team names back in 2008.

Women's college basketball has been played with a 30-second shot clock since the early 1970s; this is shorter than the 45- and 35-second clocks formerly used in the men's game. Also, since the 2015–16 season, the women's game is played in 10-minute quarters instead of 20-minute halves. It's only been sanctioned by the NCAA since the early '80s; before that, it was sanctioned by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or the AIAW. Conference affiliations match those of men's college basketball described above.note 

Notable teams include those listed below. However, the reigning national champions are none of these teams, but rather the LSU Tigers (which dropped "Lady" from their women's team names in the recent past).

  • Wayland Baptist College (now "University"): The Flying Queens were the first great college team, though they predated not only NCAA sponsorship of women's sports but also college women's competition in general. The small school from the Texas Panhandle instead competed in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), today mainly a youth sports body but then the main sponsor of amateur sports competition outside the NCAA. While some colleges competed in the AAU alongside Wayland Baptist, their main competition was well-funded business teams, which employed players in (quasi-)legitimate day jobs to get around amateurism rules. Wayland Baptist responded by being the first school to offer full-ride basketball scholarships. They also got air travel to games supplied by a wealthy local businessman, which is how they became known as the Flying Queens. They notably had a 131-game winning streak in the 1950s in AAU play (take that, UConn!), and won 10 national titles in the AAU and AIAW before stepping down in class when the NCAA took over women's sports; they're now in the NAIA. Wayland Baptist's teams from their glory years of 1948–1982 entered the Naismith Hall as a unit in 2019.
  • Immaculata College (now "University"): The Mighty Macs, representing a small Catholic school in Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs, were the first great team of the early era of women's college basketball, who reigned in the early '70s. They were partly the beneficiary of a robust Catholic Youth Organization basketball program for girls in Philadelphia, which helped make the city a stronghold for women's hoops. Notable for producing three players who in turn became Women's Basketball Hall of Fame coaches: Theresa Grentz, Rene Portland, and Marianne Stanley, with Grentz and Stanley also making the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (respectively as a player and a coach). Also, the coach of the 1970s Mighty Macs, Cathy Rush, is a member of both Halls of Fame. Like Wayland Baptist, they stepped down in class when the NCAA took over women's sports (now NCAA Division III), and are now a historical footnote. Their national championship-winning teams from 1972–1974 entered the Naismith Hall as a unit in 2014. They were also the subject of the film The Mighty Macs (with Carla Gugino as Rush).
  • Delta State: After the Mighty Macs came the Lady Statesmen from a small public school in the Mississippi Delta, who followed up Immaculata's three-peat with an AIAW three-peat of their own (1975–1977). Led by center Lusia Harris, a three-time All-American and member of both Halls of Fame who even went on to become a late-round NBA draft pick (the draft was a lot longer then, and she didn't bother trying out; it was later revealed that she was pregnant during the 1977 training camp), and coached by Margaret Wade, also a double Hall of Famer and namesake of the Wade Trophy, one of the three main D-I women's player of the year awards. Also a historical footnote, as like Wayland Baptist and Immaculata before them, they stepped down in class in the NCAA era; they're now NCAA Division II.
  • Old Dominion: The Monarchs (known in their heyday as the Lady Monarchs) out of the Hampton Roads city of Norfolk, Virginia were a dynasty of the early '80s, coached by the aforementioned Marianne Stanley. Its stars included Anne Donovan and Nancy Lieberman, both of whom are members of the Naismith and Women's Halls. When power schools were forced to pay more attention to women's sports, their star faded, though they are still a force in their conference.
  • University of Southern California: USC, or the Women of Troy. At their peak in the mid-'80s, their stars included the McGee twins, Pamela and Paula (if you're an NBA geek, you might recognize Pamela's son JaVale, and if you're a WNBA geek you may recognize Pamela's daughter Imani McGee-Stafford), Cheryl Miller (if you follow basketball at all, you probably recognize her kid brother Reggie), and Cynthia Cooper. They had a renaissance in the mid-'90s, then faded out, but are showing signs of a resurgence in 2023–24 behind freshman phenom JuJu Watkins. Cooper was their head coach for four seasons until stepping down after the 2016–17 season.
  • Louisiana Tech: The Lady Techsters were another superpower of the '80s, with four players who went on to the Women's Hall—Pam Kelly, Janice Lawrence Braxton, Kim Mulkey (now the head coach at LSU after spectacular success in the same role at Baylor), and Teresa Weatherspoon (see WNBA section below), with the last two also making it to the Naismith Hall (Weatherspoon as a player in 2019 and Mulkey in 2020 as a coach). They also had two Hall of Fame coaches in Sonja Hogg (Women's) and Leon Barmore (Naismith and Women's). LA Tech remained a national force into the '90s and strongly competitive into the 21st century, but faded in the later years of Weatherspoon's tenure as head coach (2009–2014). LA Tech then fired Weatherspoon and replaced her with Tyler Summitt, the then-23-year-old son of a famous coach any women's basketball fan should know. After two seasons, things only got worse for the Lady Techsters, as Summitt abruptly resigned shortly after the end of the 2015–16 season after admitting to an "inappropriate relationship".note 
  • Tennessee: The Lady Vols have been a consistent powerhouse in women's basketball for thirty years and counting. Legendary head coach Pat Summittnote  racked up over a thousand wins, including eight titles, since taking over as a grad student in 1972 and is the first coach in the Division I college game, men's or women's, to have over 1,000 wins (since joined by Coach K, Tara VanDerveer, Sylvia Hatchell, Geno Auriemma, and C. Vivian Stringer). Known for her Death Glare. The 'Lady' is a bit of a requirement,note  or Summitt will glare at you from beyond the grave. After Summitt was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's in 2011 (which would ultimately claim her life in 2016), she coached one final season before retiring in 2012. Summitt proved to be a Tough Act to Follow; while the Lady Vols have maintained their record of appearing in every single NCAA tournament, the 2022 tournament was their first Sweet Sixteen appearance since 2016.
  • UConn: The Huskies hit the national scene like a freight train in 1995 with an undefeated season—the first of six, including three separate Division I-record winning streaks of (in chronological order) 70, 90, and 111 games. Not to mention a regular-season winning streak of 126, also a record. The 90- and 111-game streaks each encompassed at least part of three seasons, while the 126-game streak covered three full regular seasons and parts of two others. They've won 11 national titles, the most in the women's game, all under current head coach Geno Auriemma; the most recent title in 2016 took him past John Wooden for the most Division I titles by a head coach in either the men's or women's game. Equally remarkably, the Huskies had never lost a title game until 2022, and saw a streak of 14 straight Final Four appearances end in 2023 (ironically, a year in which the Huskies men won the natty). Auriemma, who became the fourth D-I women's head coach with 1,000 wins mere hours after North Carolina's Sylvia Hatchell became the third, is basically Philadelphia distilled into a short first-generation Italian-American. They have a web page dedicated to their history of churning out WNBA stars. Possibly an even more astonishing feat: the Huskies went almost exactly 30 years (March 1993–February 2023) without losing consecutive games.
  • Stanford: The Cardinal (yes, Cardinal, the color, not the bird) was the lone representative of high-quality women's basketball on the West Coast for a loooong time until the very recent emergence of other Pac-12 schools, such as Oregon (thanks largely to Sabrina Ionescu; see the WNBA section), Oregon State, and Arizona (whom the Cardinal narrowly defeated for the 2021 title). Three-time national champions and several more times bridesmaid, they're coached by Tara VanDerveer, who became the second D-I women's head coach with 1,000 wins in 2017, passed Pat Summitt for the most wins by a D-I women's head coach in 2020, and passed Coach K's wins total on the men's side in 2024, with Auriemma hot on her heels. The Cardinal's 2021 championship ended the program's and VanDerveer's 29-year title drought—the longest gap between titles for any NCAA Division I coach in any sport, not just basketball. They ended UConn's 90-game winning streak.note  You might not want to mention Harvard around them. note 
  • Rutgers: The Scarlet Knights are best known for stifling defense, unwatchable offense, now-retired coach C. Vivian Stringer's Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, and that incident with Don Imus that left Imus fired and the governor of New Jersey in a car accident. Stringer reached the 1,000-win mark early in the 2018–19 season.
  • Baylor: The Bears, known as "Lady Bears" before 2021–22, rose to national prominence early in the current century with the aforementioned Kim Mulkey as head coach. When she took over in 2000, Baylor was coming off a last-place Big 12 finish. She took them to the NCAA tournament the next season, and they've only missed the NCAA once since. Their first national title in 2005 saw Mulkey become the first woman to win D-I national titles as a player and coachnote , and their second championship team in 2012 was the first NCAA team of either sex to go 40–0 in a season. Baylor's WNBA alumni include Sophia Young from the first title team, Brittney Griner and Odyssey Sims from the second, and Kalani Brown, Lauren Cox, and NaLyssa Smith from the third in 2019. Also notable for the most one-sided win in D-I women's history, a 140–32 annihilation of Winthrop in 2016, not to mention ending UConn's 126-game regular-season winning streak in 2019. However, Baylor underwent a major transition in 2021, as Mulkey left to fill the (women's) head coaching vacancy at LSU, in the process returning to her home state.* Mulkey went on to win a fourth national title in her second season at LSU in 2023, making her the first (and so far only) women's or men's coach to win the D-I natty at two different schools.
  • Notre Dame: The Fighting Irish have emerged as a major national rival to UConn in recent years. While the Huskies have had the upper hand overall, the Irish have a 5–3 lead in their NCAA tournament matchups, and were responsible for more than half of the Huskies' losses from 2011 to 2019 (8 out of 15). National champs in 2001 and 2018, and runners-up in five other NCAA tournaments in The New '10s (to Texas A&M in 2011, Baylor in 2012 and 2019, and UConn in 2014 and 2015), and alma mater of current WNBA stars Skylar Diggins-Smith, Jewell Loyd, and Arike Ogunbowale. Much has been made of the supposed Arch-Enemy relationship between now-retired Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw and UConn's Geno Auriemma, who both share Philadelphia roots and fiercely competitive personalities. The 2019–20 season, however, was definitely rebuilding time under the Golden Dome, as the Irish had lost their entire starting lineup to graduation; despite several promising recruits, they finished under .500. McGraw stepped down after that season, with Niele Ivey, a former Irish player who went on to a long tenure as an Irish assistant and a season as an NBA assistant, taking her place. They had a brief rebuilding mode, with a Sweet Sixteen appearance in 2022 the first big step in returning to Final Four contention.
  • South Carolina: The two-time national champion Gamecocks emerged in the last half of the 2010s as the SEC's new kid on the block with double Hall of Fame player Dawn Staley as head coach. They've made every NCAA tournament since 2012, missing the Sweet Sixteen only once in that span, with four Final Fours and the 2017 and '22 national titles as well, in the latter season becoming the only team ever to beat UConn in a national title game. Not to mention they were the top-ranked team when COVID scuttled the 2020 tournament; Carolina claims a mythical national title from that season. Current WNBA superstar A'ja Wilson was the biggest star of the first title team, with Aliyah Boston, star of the 2020s teams, ready to join her in WNBA superstardom as the top overall pick in the 2023 WNBA draft and that year's unanimous Rookie of the Year. Even after having to replace the entire starting lineup in 2023–24, the Gamecocks entered the NCAA tournament unbeaten. The Gamecocks suffered rare tastes of defeat when they were upset by Kentucky in the 2022 SEC Championship Game, and again when one Caitlin Clark (now the all-time D-I career scoring leader) torched them for 41 points to lead Iowa to an upset in the 2023 NCAA semifinals, spoiling a previously unbeaten season.

UConn and Tennessee are fiercely opposed to each other. The rivalry became an annual series, until Summitt ended it in 2007, accusing Connecticut of improper recruiting. Many attempts were made to reconcile the two sides, or at least have them meet in the NCAA tournament. It took the Naismith Hall to broker a deal to have them play again; they finally played again in 2020 and 2021, and kept the series going through 2023. Neither is particularly fond of Rutgers. And the Huskies are not totally fond of Notre Dame these days (though the Irish are at worst a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis, and perhaps even Worthy Opponents).

Since 2022, the women's NCAA tournament has featured 68 teams, the same size as the men's tournament, with its own First Four conducted under almost the same conditions as the one on the men's side. Previously, the women's tournament had 64 teams, much as the men did before the play-in game was added in 2001. One huge difference between the tournaments is that the top four seeds in each regional get to host the first two rounds.note  Also, four of the 16 subregional hosts get to host First Four games, instead of having the First Four at a neutral site as the men do. Another significant difference is that the women's Final Four is almost always held in a traditional arena.note  The 2023 tournament ushered in a significant format change—the four regional sites have been collapsed to two, although the size of the tournament remains the same, and each site advances two teams to the Final Four from separate brackets.

Before the 2018 men's tournament, if you wanted to stump your friends, you could have asked them the only time a #16 seed had ever beaten a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. When they looked at you and say "Never", you'd have told them you didn't specify gender and Harvard beat Stanford in 1998. (If you're unfortunate enough to have a Stanford fan in the group who will haughtily inform you that Harvard had the nation's leading scorer and Stanford had lost their two top players to knee injuries in the two weeks before the tournament... run.) That won't work any longer, now that UMBC took down Virginia in the 2018 men's tournament and Fairleigh Dickinson did the same to Purdue in the 2023 edition.

    College Basketball Awards 
As with all sports, college basketball hands out a boatload of postseason awards, both at the conference and national levels, to both players and coaches. Because of the sheer number of awards, we can't list them all here, but we're including several of the more prominent national awards. Winners are from the 2022–23 season.

Players

  • While there are many national player of the year awards, these are generally seen as the most prestigious:
    • Naismith Trophy: Named after the inventor of basketball and presented by the Atlanta Tipoff Club, with the voting body consisting of head coaches, administrators, and media members, plus fan voting once the finalists are chosen. First presented for the men in 1969 and the women in 1983.
      • Most recent winners (2023): Zach Edey, C, junior*, Purdue; Caitlin Clark, PG, junior, Iowa (women)
    • Wooden Award: Named after the aforementioned John Wooden and presented by the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The club has an advisory panel that picks the initial nominees, with the winners determined by voting by a large body of media members. First presented for men in 1977 and women in 2004.
      • Most recent winners (2023): Edey (men); Clark (women)
    • Wade Trophy: A women's-only award, presented by the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, which is mainly the trade association for women's basketball coaches but has a much larger membership base. Only the coaching section of the WBCA votes on it, however. Named for the aforementioned Margaret Wade, it's the oldest women's player of the year award, first being presented in 1978. Notably, unlike the Naismith and Wooden awards, freshmen are ineligible.note 
      • Most recent winner (2023): Clark
  • The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame is at least partly responsible for presenting parallel suites of men's and women's awards that it calls the "Naismith Starting Five", handed out to the top players at each of the traditional basketball positions.
    • Bob Cousy Award: Presented since 2004 to the top men's point guard. The award honors the Boston Celtics legend, and the HOF partners with Cousy's alma mater of Holy Cross in its presentation.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Markquis Nowell, 5th-year senior,note  Kansas State
    • Jerry West Award: The first of four positional awards introduced by the HOF in 2015. Presented to the top men's shooting guard; named after the Los Angeles Lakers great.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Marcus Sasser, senior, Houston
    • Julius Erving Award: Presented since 2015 to the top men's small forward. Named after the ABA and NBA great who was most famous for his time with the Philadelphia 76ers.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Jalen Wilson, senior, Kansas
    • Karl Malone Award: Presented since 2015 to the top men's power forward, and named for the Utah Jazz great.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Trayce Jackson-Davis, senior, Indiana
    • Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award: Presented since 2015 to the top men's center; named for the UCLA, Milwaukee Bucks, and Lakers legend.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Edey
    • Nancy Lieberman Award: Presented since 2000 to the top women's point guard, honoring the double Hall of Famer. Originally presented by the Rotary Club of Detroit; taken over by the HOF in 2014, followed by the HOF partnering with the WBCA in 2018.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Clarknote 
    • Ann Meyers Drysdale Award: The first of four positional awards introduced by the HOF and WBCA in 2018. Presented to the top women's shooting guard; named after the UCLA and Team USA legend.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Zia Cooke, senior, South Carolina
    • Cheryl Miller Award: Presented since 2018 to the top women's small forward. Named after the USC and Team USA legend.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Ashley Joens, 5th-year senior, Iowa Statenote 
    • Katrina McClain Award: Presented since 2018 to the top women's power forward, and named for the Georgia and Team USA great.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Maddy Siegrist, senior, Villanova
    • Lisa Leslie Award: Presented since 2018 to the top women's center; named for the USC, Team USA, and Los Angeles Sparks great.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Aliyah Boston, senior, South Carolinanote 
  • While there are several awards for the top freshmen of the year, the most prominent are those presented by the United States Basketball Writers Association, the trade association for college basketball writers.
    • Wayman Tisdale Award: The men's version, first presented in 1989 as the "USBWA National Freshman of the Year". In 2010, the award was renamed after Tisdale, who had been a first-team All-American as a freshman at Oklahoma in 1983, and went on to a decent NBA career and a successful second career as a jazz bass guitarist until his death from cancer in 2009.note 
      • Most recent winner (2024): Reed Sheppard, SG, Kentucky
    • Tamika Catchings Award: The women's version, first presented in 2003. Renamed after the former Tennessee, Team USA, and Indiana Fever great in 2019; unlike Tisdale, she was alive to enjoy this honor.
      • Most recent winner (2024): JuJu Watkins, SG, USC
  • Academic All-America Team Member of the Year: The sport's Badass Bookworm award, presented by College Sports Communicatorsnote  since 1988 for both men and women. CSC names "Academic All-Americans" in five men's and five women's sports, as well as "at-large" men's and women's teams covering all other NCAA championship sports, based both on academic accomplishment and excellence of play (but greatly emphasizing the academic side). CSC names separate teams for all three NCAA divisions, plus the NAIA. In basketball, three levels of Academic All-Americans are recognized, with one player from each sex at each level of play recognized as the Team Member of the Year.
    • Most recent Division I winners (2023): Ben Vander Plas, Virginia (men);note  Clark (women)note 

Coaches

  • The most prominent awards for college coaches include the following:
    • Naismith College Coach of the Year: Part of the Naismith Trophy program; introduced in 1987 for both men and women. Note that all major coaching awards are bifurcated by the sex/gender of the team, not the recipient.
      • Most recent winners (2023): Jerome Tang, Kansas State (men); Dawn Staley, South Carolina (women)
    • Associated Press Coach of the Year: Presented by the American press agency since 1967 for the men and 1995 for the women. More prestigious than the AP's player of the year awards.
      • Most recent winners (2023): Shaka Smart, Marquette (men); Teri Moren, Indiana (women)
    • Henry Iba Award: Presented by the USBWA since 1959 to the top men's coach, originally as "USBWA National Coach of the Year" but later renamed after the longtime Oklahoma State coach.
      • Most recent winner (2024): Kelvin Sampson, Houston
    • USBWA (Women's) National Coach of the Year: The women's version of the above, presented since 1990.
      • Most recent winner (2024): Staleynote 
    • Maggie Dixon Award: A women's award with no men's counterpart, this has been presented since 2007 by the WBCA to the top first-year Division I head coach. The award's namesake died in the 2006 offseason from an undiagnosed heart defect after her first season as head coach at Army. As with most-all coaching awards, the recipient's sex is irrelevant.
      • Most recent winner (2023): Shawn Poppie,note  Chattanooga

     The WNBA: Professional Women's Basketball 

The WNBA, often called just "the W", started up in 1997. There were women's leagues before, but none of them lasted long (the longest was the WBL, which had three seasons in the late '70s/early '80s); the WNBA, on the other hand, has been one of the most stable and lucrative women's team sports leagues in the US, though still nowhere near as profitable as the NBA.

Differences to note: the ball is smaller (by 1 inch/2.54 cm in circumference) and lighter (by 2 ounces/57 g) and also striped oatmeal and orange,note  the three-point arc is closer than in the NBA (the FIBA arc except in the corners, which are NBA distance), quarters are 10 minutes each (the same as NCAA women's basketball).

That said, arguably the biggest difference is the season structure. The WNBA's season is out of phase with basketball in the rest of the world—it's held during the northern hemisphere summer, when other basketball leagues (even those south of the equator) are in their offseason. The league was started, and is still owned, by the NBA, although it's had its own chief executive throughout its history (titled "President" until 2019, now "Commissioner"). Originally, all WNBA teams were owned by the league. The summer season was established for several reasons. The first was TV windows. While the current end of the season does conflict with college football and the NFL, as well as MLB's postseason, the competition for TV times is much lower than during the NBA and NHL seasons. The second is venue availability—with a summer season, arena dates were much more available than during the NBA, NHL, and college basketball seasons. This also meant that team owners in other leagues, especially the NBA, could fill more arena dates. After the 2002 season, the league sold the teams; eight were purchased by their then-current NBA counterparts, one was bought by an NBA team in a different city,note  another was bought by an outside party,note  and twonote  folded when new owners weren't found. The regular season normally starts in late May and ends in September, with playoffs running into October. However, in Olympic years, the league takes a break to allow players to represent their national teams, while the league compresses its schedule in FIBA World Cup years to allow an earlier season end. Also, the start of the 2020 season was delayed due to COVID-19, and the abbreviated season was played entirely at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida.

Another difference is that since the 2021 season, the WNBA has held a mid-season tournament, a rare feature in major US team sports.note  Through 2023, the Commissioner's Cup started with 10 regular-season games for each team, specifically the first home and away games against each other team in its conference. In 2024, this will be reduced to 5 games, one against each in-conference team (with two or three at home), all in the first half of June. After all teams play their Cup games, the teams that top each conference in the Cup standings advance to a one-off Cup final. The Cup was planned to debut in 2020 before COVID-19 got in the way.

Because the league started with all teams owned by NBA franchises, most teams have names similar to their NBA counterparts. There have been exceptions, and teams not owned by NBA owners have more independent names, even if they're in NBA cities.

Eastern Conference

  • Atlanta Dream: Founded in 2008, named for Atlanta-native Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. As of 2020, they're three-time Eastern Conference Champions, but they've yet to cross the finish line of winning a WNBA championship, getting swept three consecutive times, twice by the Minnesota Lynx in 2011 and 2013. While the Dream shared State Farm Arena with the Hawks from 2008 to 2016 and again in 2019, the Hawks never held any ownership stake in its WNBA contemporary. In 2020, the Dream planned to move into the Gateway Center Arena in the south Atlanta suburb of College Park, sharing the venue with the Hawks' G League affiliate, the College Park Skyhawks. The most recent team to have had an ownership change. In 2021, the former ownership group sold out after extreme pressure from players, largely driven by the presence of Kelly Loeffler, former Republican Senator for Georgia who had disparaged the Black Lives Matter Movement.note  The new ownership group includes Renee Montgomery, who had retired from the league months earlier; she's the first WNBA alum to have invested in a team and taken an active executive role (other alums have filled one of the roles, but not both).
  • Chicago Sky: Founded in 2006, notable for being the first franchise to be founded without NBA ties. Named for the Chicago skyline. They made an especially strong run in 2011, but never made a playoff appearance until picking up college superstar Elena Delle Donne in 2013. During EDD's time in Chicago, their flameouts came in the playoffs (first-round exit, swept in the Finals, first-round exit, second-round exit). They slid back to mediocrity after her departure to Washington, but rebounded once Courtney Vandersloot made a habit of setting new WNBA single-season assist records, and the arrival of area native Candace Parker in 2021 was followed by their first-ever title.
  • Connecticut Sun: Founded in 1999 as the Orlando Miracle (tied to the Orlando Magic), moved to Connecticut in 2003 to become the Sun (named for the Mohegan Sun casino where they play). The Sun was the first WNBA team to be owned independently of an NBA team (specifically by the Mohegan Native American tribe) and the first profitable team in league history. This is potentially because of their location: the Sun are the only WNBA team to not share a market with another "Big Four" professional sports team, and said market has been especially crazy for women's basketball since UConn's meteoric ascent in the '90s. The team is even called USunn due to the plethora of UConn alumnae on the roster (five out of eleven players in 2013). The current face of the team is current triple-double threat Alyssa Thomas.
  • Indiana Fever: Founded in 2000, named for Indiana's well-known basketball obsession. Saved from potential folding with a run to the 2009 Finals, and then won the 2012 Finals. Was projected to make its first profit in 2013 and remained a competitive force until the end of the 2010s. They share the Indiana Pacers' home of Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis (though renovations displaced them for part of the early 2020s). The Fever may show signs of a resurgence in 2024, with 2023 ROY Aliyah Boston almost certain to be joined by all-time Division I career scoring leader Caitlin Clark.note 
  • New York Liberty: The last inaugural franchise left in the East, founded in 1997 and named for the big green statue in the harbor. This is the team that has gone the longest without a WNBA title. Dubbed the Libs, and in recent years the Libbies, as well as the Libkids for their young roster. The team's popularity swelled upon the acquisition of Cappie Pondexter, though it waned again after the news of said exile, and, to a lesser extent, the suspension of Janel McCarville. And then the Libs' owner James Dolan, also owner of the New York Knicks, tried to bring in Isiah Thomas to run the team... the same Isiah Thomas who had proved to be as epic a failure as an executive with the Knicks as he was great as a player and on top of that had just lost a sexual harassment lawsuit. In 2019, the Liberty was acquired by Joseph Tsai, now sole owner of the Brooklyn Nets, and moved into the Nets' home of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn once the WNBA returned to home arenas in 2021. The "Libkids" name came back in 2020—they had three first-round picks (including #1) in the 2020 draft and ended up with seven rookies on their opening-night roster of 12, with no player even 30 years old and only one over 26. The #1 pick, to the surprise of absolutely no one, was Sabrina Ionescu, arguably the face of US women's basketball before being picked. They went all-in for a title run in 2023, picking up Vandersloot and former MVP Breanna Stewart in free agency and trading for former MVP Jonquel Jones. They won the Commissioner's Cup but lost in the Finals to the Aces.
  • Washington Mystics: Founded in 1998, named for the Washington Wizards; they share ownership with the Wizards and the NHL's Washington Capitals. The Fan Nickname "Mystakes" came up for their incredible knack for screwing things up. Despite this, they have a pretty strong attendance record (several "Attendance Championship" banners were once raised on their arena's rafters). Home of a very Broken Base, though EDD's arrival plus other roster upgrades for the 2017 season gave the fans hope, which was cemented with a 2018 Finals appearance and their first-ever title in 2019. It's highly unlikely that they'll win any more "attendance championships" in the future—they moved out of the Wizards and Caps' home of Capital One Arena after the 2018 season to a new arena in southeast DC that only seats 4,200; the Mystics share the venue with the Wizards' G League affiliate, the Capital City Go-Go.

Western Conference

  • Dallas Wings: Founded in 1998 as the Detroit Shock (as in the car part, to better reflect the Detroit Pistons), moved to Tulsa in 2010, retaining their nickname. Tulsa was the league's Butt-Monkey for virtually all of its time in Oklahoma. In 2011, they set a new league record for futility with a 3-31 skid. The case of the Shock was unique in that Tulsa claimed the history of the Detroit Shock, including Detroit's three championship banners... but with Tulsa's Butt-Monkey status, most fans were uncomfortable with giving them Detroit's Guile Hero status. In 2013, things finally looked hopeful when they gained the charismatic Notre Dame superstar Skylar Diggins (now Diggins-Smith). Her weak rookie debut might have damaged those hopes, but those fears largely disappeared after a strong sophomore season, and she became one of the league's top guards before a pregnancy leave in 2019, followed by her departure to Phoenix after that season. By that time, a more than adequate replacement had arrived in the form of Arike Ogunbowale. The Shock finally made their first playoff appearance since the move in 2015... right after the team announced it would move to Dallasnote  for 2016, later announcing that it would drop the Shock name.
  • Las Vegas Aces: The two-time defending WNBA champions, founded in 1997 as the Utah Starzz (named for their Spear Counterpart, the Utah Jazz, and the Jazz's precursor, the ABA's Utah Stars), moved to San Antonio in 2003 as the Silver Stars and brought into the fold of the San Antonio Spurs. Started off lousy, but they got better in San Antonio, turning a profit in 2011. Dropped "Silver" from their name shortly before the start of the 2014 season. In 2017, the Spurs sold the Stars to MGM Resorts, who moved the team to Vegas and rebranded the team as the Aces. MGM Resorts sold out in January 2021 to Mark Davis, de facto owner of the NFL's Las Vegas Raiders.* Becky Hammon, a former franchise star from the San Antonio era, was brought in as HC in 2022 and immediately led the Aces to both the Commissioner's Cup and the first title in franchise history, and followed it up with a second title in 2023. Currently have their own "superteam" cred, with Candace Parker joining A'ja Wilson and Kelsey Plum for 2023 (though Parker missed most of the season to injury). Also in 2023, Tom Brady became a minority investor.
  • Los Angeles Sparks: One of the inaugural franchises, founded in 1997. The only one with a Non-Indicative Name of any kind (as there's not really a feminine equivalent to "Lakers"), their name came from a secretary watching a welder. Sometimes called Sporks or Sharks by opposing fans. Three-time champions, first with back-to-back titles in 2001-02 led by the legendary Lisa Leslie (who made WNBA history in 2011 by becoming the first alumna to become part owner of a team, though she and her group sold out two years later to a group led by Magic Johnson) and then in 2016 led by Nneka Ogwumike and Candace Parker.
  • Minnesota Lynx: Founded in 1999, named as a counterpart to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Survived several rough seasons to stockpile approximately a metric crapton of young talent that has paid dividends since 2011. Once they picked up collegiate superstar Maya Moore and hometown hero Lindsay Whalen, momentum immediately began to shift in their direction, and they finally won a title in 2011, followed by three more in '13, '15, and '17, officially becoming a dynasty.
  • Phoenix Mercury: Founded in 1997, named as a counterpart to the Phoenix Suns... and they play like them too. Sometimes called the Merc, while multiple players at once are Mercs. Three-time champions. Share the venue now known as Footprint Center with the Phoenix Suns; they were scheduled to play the 2020 season at the Suns' past home of Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum while the FC was being renovated, but COVID-19 ended that plan.
  • Seattle Storm: Founded in 2000, named for Seattle's weather. Have won four titles, most recently in 2020, and also won the first Commissioner's Cup in 2021. Lots of star power, and now Seattle's main basketball team because of the loss of the Sonics, attracting plenty of fans in the process. With the Seattle Center Arena having been rebuilt for the NHL's Seattle Kraken (and renamed Climate Pledge Arena), the Storm returned to their permanent home effective in 2022.

Former teams

  • Charlotte Sting: Founded in 1997, folded in 2007. Originally tied to the Charlotte Hornets, later tied to the Charlotte Bobcats; the shift in ownership after the Hornets moved to New Orleans signaled the beginning of the end for this once proud franchise.
  • Cleveland Rockers: Founded in 1997, folded in 2004. Named for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Left a LOT of bitterness behind, due to the perception of former owner (and Cavaliers owner at the time) Gordon Gund blocking alternate ownership, which resulted in a Harsher in Hindsight moment when Gund recorded a macular degeneration PSA with the tagline "How would you feel if you couldn't see your favorite team?" ("Like a Rockers fan, jerk.")
  • Houston Comets: The league's first dynasty, winning its first four championships. Their name kept up the space Theme Naming for many of Houston's sports teams. If you're referring to the Big Three in a women's basketball context, you're referring to Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes, and Tina Thompson, or you have just made a lot of people very angry. Founded in 1997, folded in 2008.
  • Miami Sol: Founded in 2000, folded in 2003. WMG suggests that this was the team meant to move to Connecticut, as the Sun's original color scheme closely matched the Sol's, and it would have made the name change a bit more understandable.
  • Portland Fire: Founded in 2000, folded in 2003. Their name is a play off Blazers. One of only two franchises never to make the playoffs in their history (if you count Tulsa/Dallas as holding Detroit's history).
  • Sacramento Monarchs: Founded in 1997, folded in 2009. Were the WNBA champions in 2005. Though their name was related to the Sacramento Kings, they also played with the Monarch butterfly theme.

WNBA Finals champions by year

Note: The first year of the WNBA had only one championship game, where winner takes all. After that, the WNBA had a best-of-three series until 2005, when the championship series became best-of-five. Also, keep in mind that the WNBA begins their season in the middle of the year. Also, since 2016, the league has not used conference affiliation to determine playoff spots; the top eight teams in the regular season, regardless of conference, make the playoffs. (Since then, four finals matchups have been East vs. West, namely 2018 and 2021–2023.)

  • 1997: The Houston Comets won over the New York Liberty with the final score of 65-61.
  • 1998: The Houston Comets won over the Phoenix Mercury 2-1.
  • 1999: The Houston Comets won over the New York Liberty 2-1.
  • 2000: The Houston Comets swept the New York Liberty 2-0.
  • 2001: The Los Angeles Sparks swept the Charlotte Sting 2-0.
  • 2002: The Los Angeles Sparks swept the New York Liberty 2-0.
  • 2003: The Detroit Shock won over the Los Angeles Sparks 2-1.
  • 2004: The Seattle Storm won over the Connecticut Sun 2-1.
  • 2005: The Sacramento Monarchs won over the Connecticut Sun 3-1.
  • 2006: The Detroit Shock won over the Sacramento Monarchs 3-2.
  • 2007: The Phoenix Mercury won over the Detroit Shock 3-2.
  • 2008: The Detroit Shock swept the San Antonio Silver Stars 3-0.
  • 2009: The Phoenix Mercury won over the Indiana Fever 3-2.
  • 2010: The Seattle Storm swept the Atlanta Dream 3-0.
  • 2011: The Minnesota Lynx swept the Atlanta Dream 3-0.
  • 2012: The Indiana Fever won over the Minnesota Lynx 3-1.
  • 2013: The Minnesota Lynx swept the Atlanta Dream 3-0.
  • 2014: The Phoenix Mercury swept the Chicago Sky 3-0.
  • 2015: The Minnesota Lynx beat the Indiana Fever 3-2.
  • 2016: The Los Angeles Sparks beat the Minnesota Lynx 3-2.
  • 2017: The Minnesota Lynx beat the Los Angeles Sparks 3-2.
  • 2018: The Seattle Storm swept the Washington Mystics 3-0.
  • 2019: The Washington Mystics beat the Connecticut Sun 3-2.
  • 2020: The Seattle Storm swept the Las Vegas Aces 3-0.
  • 2021: The Chicago Sky beat the Phoenix Mercury 3-1.
  • 2022: The Las Vegas Aces beat the Connecticut Sun 3–1.
  • 2023: The Las Vegas Aces beat the New York Liberty 3–1.

WNBA Commissioner's Cup winners

As noted previously, the Commissioner's Cup was originally scheduled to start in 2020, but was delayed to 2021 due to COVID-19. The 2021 final was the league's first game after its Olympic break; finals since then have taken place at roughly the season midpoint.
  • 2021: The Seattle Storm beat the Connecticut Sun 79–57 in Phoenix.
  • 2022: The Las Vegas Aces beat the Chicago Sky 93–83 in Chicago.
  • 2023: The New York Liberty beat the Las Vegas Aces 82–63 in Las Vegas.

     WNBA Awards and Honors 
As with the NBA and college basketball, the WNBA presents a boatload of awards at the end of the season. The specific awards are as follows. The "most recent winners" are from the 2023 season. Team affiliations reflect those in the season for which the award was presented. Except as indicated, all awards have been presented since the league's first season in 1997, and the voting body for all awards consists of media members. Unlike the NBA, which has gone the award-show route to present its awards (or at least did before COVID-19), the WNBA announces all awards separately.
  • The Most Valuable Player Award (MVP) is given to the player who is considered to have been the top performer of the regular season. There are no restrictions on who can be named MVP, but it almost always goes to a player from a team that made the playoffs. Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, and Lauren Jackson have the most MVP awards with three; Elena Delle Donne and Breanna Stewart are the only players to win this award with two different franchises.
    • Most Recent Winner: Breanna Stewart, F, Libertynote 
  • The Rookie of the Year Award is given to the rookie who is considered to have had the best season. Though a rookie is generally defined as a first-year player, she doesn't necessarily have to be. As long as the player enters the current season without having played in the WNBA, she is considered to be in her rookie season. Experience in leagues outside the WNBA is not counted against a player; unlike baseball, which has experienced controversy due to Japanese-born players winning that sport's award despite having prior professional experience in Japanese baseball, there has been little if any controversy over eligibility of former foreign professionals. However, no player with previous pro experience has won this award.
    • Most Recent Winner: Aliyah Boston, F/C, Fevernote 
  • The Defensive Player of the Year Award is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. That said, it's often one of the more controversial awards, because defense (1) can't always be quantified and (2) can differ dramatically based on position. Tamika Catchings has the most awards with five.
    • Most Recent Winner: A'ja Wilson, F, Acesnote 
  • The Most Improved Player of the Year Award is also Exactly What It Says on the Tin. There are no specific guidelines on who can win, except that the ballot stipulates that the award "is not intended to be given to a player who has made a comeback."note  It usually goes to a player who takes a sudden jump from "who the heck is she?" to "she's actually pretty good". Leilani Mitchell is the only player to have won this award twice (2010 and 2019).
    • Most Recent Winner: Satou Sabally, F, Wingsnote 
  • The Sixth Player of the Year Awardnote  goes to the best bench player of the regular season. Players who started in more games than they played strictly as a substitute are ineligible. DeWanna Bonner has the most awards with three. Jonquel Jones is the only player to have won this award and be named MVP (Sixth Player, 2018; MVP, 2021).
    • Most Recent Winner: Alysha Clark, F, Acesnote 
  • The Coach of the Year Award goes to the top head coach of the regular season. There are no specific guidelines for who can win, but the award typically goes to the manager of a team who achieved surprising success, usually a team that was expected to finish low in the standings but ended up competing for a title. The record for most wins is three, held by Van Chancellor, Mike Thibault, and Cheryl Reeve. Thibault, Dan Hughes, and Bill Laimbeer have won with two different franchises.
    • Most Recent Winner: Stephanie White, Sunnote 
  • The Executive of the Year Award, first presented in 2017, goes to the season's top general manager. Unlike the other season awards, media members play no role in the voting; the league's GMs vote instead. There are no specific guidelines for who can win, but the award typically goes to the GM of a contending team. Dan Padover is the only two-time winner to date, winning in 2020 and 2021 when he was GM of the Aces.
    • Most Recent Winner: Jonathan Kolb, Libertynote 
  • The Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award, the Distaff Counterpart of the NBA Sportsmanship Award, goes to the player viewed as the league's most sportsmanlike. Similar to the Lady Byng Award in the NHL, although unlike that award it does not demand excellence of play. Each WNBA team nominates a player, with media members then voting for the recipient. Named after Kim Perrot, who helped lead the Houston Comets to the first two league championships in 1997 and 1998 before being diagnosed with the lung cancer that ended her career and life in 1999. Tamika Catchings and Nneka Ogwumike have the most awards, each with three, with all of Ogwumike's being consecutive.
    • Most Recent Winner: Elizabeth Williams, C, Sky
  • WNBA Peak Performers: Statistically based awards honoring the regular season's top performers in several categories. In 1997, awards were presented to "shooting champions" in each conference. From 1998 to 2001, the awards changed to honor the leaders in field-goal and free-throw percentage. In 2002, they changed again to honor the league's per-game scoring and rebounding leaders, with the assists leader added in 2007. Courtney Vandersloot has the most awards, with seven for assists.
    • Most Recent Winners: Scoring – Jewell Loyd, G, Storm; rebounding – Alyssa Thomas, F, Sun; assists – Courtney Vandersloot, G, Liberty
Three other awards are based on performance in a specific league event:
  • The WNBA All-Star Game Most Valuable Player is just that. Like the seasonal playing awards, voted on by the media, in this case immediately after the game so that the trophy can be handed out in the postgame festivities. Unlike the NBA's ASG, which is held every season, the WNBA version hasn't been held in every season. From 2004 through 2020, no game was held in any Olympic year. In 2010, the ASG was replaced by a game between Team USA and a WNBA all-star team; that game is not considered an official ASG. The same format was followed in 2021, serving as a warm-up for Team USA prior to the delayed Tokyo Olympics; unlike the 2010 game, this one was an official ASG. The 2024 season will have an official ASG despite it being an Olympic year. Lisa Leslie and Maya Moore have the most awards, each with three.
    • Most Recent Winner: Loyd
  • The WNBA Commissioner's Cup Most Valuable Player Award, introduced with the Cup in 2021, honors the best performer in the Cup final. All awards to date have gone to a player on the winning team.
    • Most Recent Winner: Jonquel Jones, F, Liberty
  • The WNBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award honors the best performer in the WNBA Finals. Every award to date has gone to a player on the championship team. Cynthia Cooper, who won the first four awards (1997–2000), still has sole possession of the record for most awards.
    • Most Recent Winner: Wilson

Also after the regular season, all-league teams are chosen honoring the best players in three different categories. Recipients listed here are those for 2023.

All-WNBA Team

The best players in the league. The honor dates back to the league's first season in 1997. Unlike the All-NBA Team, in which the number of players honored has varied over time, the WNBA's version has always honored 10 players. Through the 2021 season, the WNBA and NBA versions were similar in that each team included one center, two forwards, and two guards, but the WNBA announced late in the 2022 season that future All-WNBA Teams would be selected without regard to position. (The NBA will follow suit in 2023–24.)

Players are listed in order of points received in voting; this applies to all teams below. Ties are sorted by family name, except that the top individual honoree (MVP here; DPOY and ROY for the other teams) is always first.

A team may be expanded in the case of ties in voting; this applies to the other honors listed below.
  • First Team: Breanna Stewart, F, Liberty; Alyssa Thomas, F, Sun; A'ja Wilson, F, Aces; Napheesa Collier, F, Lynx; Satou Sabally, F, Wings
  • Second Team: Nneka Ogwumike, F, Sparks; Jackie Young, G, Aces; Chelsea Gray, G, Aces; Jewell Loyd, G, Storm; Sabrina Ionescu, G, Liberty

All-Defensive Team

Exactly What It Says on the Tin. First presented in 2005, with the league's head coaches voting; coaches cannot vote for players on their own teams. Throughout the history of the award, 10 players have been chosen, divided into two teams. Before the 2023 season, each level of All-Defensive Team consisted of one center, two forwards, and two guards. From 2023, team composition no longer takes position into account. Also, the voting for the All-Defensive Team is completely separate from that of DPOY.
  • First Team: Wilson; Thomas; Brittney Sykes, G, Mystics; Stewart; Jordin Canada, G, Sparks
  • Second Team: Betnijah Laney, G/F, Liberty; Ezi Magbegor, C, Storm; Ogwumike; Collier; Elizabeth Williams, C, Sky

All-Rookie Team

Also Exactly What It Says on the Tin; first presented in 2005. The league's head coaches have been the voting body throughout the history of the award. Coaches cannot vote for their own players. Throughout the history of the award, 5 players have been chosen without regard to position.
  • All-Rookie Team: Aliyah Boston, F/C, Fever; Jordan Horston, G/F, Storm; Dorka Juhász, F, Lynx; Diamond Miller, F, Lynx; Li Meng, G, Mystics

    Notable WNBA Players 

Note: these are mostly players who have, or have had, pop culture currency; if you want to make a women's basketball reference, you'll probably use one of these players.

  • Seimone Augustus: Forward who spent all but the last of her 16 WNBA seasons with the Minnesota Lynx. Discovered in high school for her promising basketball talent. She was even featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated for women, promoting her as the possible female Michael Jordan. Her success continued during her college years at LSU where she won many awards including College Player of the Year. She led her college team to three Final Four appearances, and LSU put a statue of her up in front of its arena in 2023. Augustus was drafted #1 overall by the Lynx in 2006, where she quickly made her presence known by winning Rookie of the Year. In 2011, when another promising rookie named Maya Moore joined the team, she led the Lynx to their first WNBA title and won the Finals MVP Award. In 2013, she once again helped lead the Lynx to their second title in franchise history. In 2015, she came back from an injury just in time for the playoffs and helped lead the Lynx to a third WNBA title. She initially planned to retire after the 2019 season, but lost most of that season to injury, and ultimately left for the L.A. Sparks as a free agent, spending the 2020 season in the "Wubble"* in Bradenton. Shortly before the start of the 2021 season, Augustus retired from play and became an assistant for the Sparks.
  • Sue Bird: Point guard for the Seattle Storm from her 2002 selection out of UConn as the #1 overall pick until her retirement in 2022. The quintessential Girl Next Door- if the girl next door could find you blind on the fast break or drain a dagger three in your face. Her especially clutch play in 2011 earned her the Fan Nickname "Die complaines". Bird is the WNBA's all-time leader in seasons played, games played, and total assists, but doesn't have the per-game assists record (see Courtney Vandersloot below). She and fellow UConn alum Diana Taurasi (below) are the only two basketball players with five Olympic gold medals, and Bird herself is the only player, male or female, with four golds and five total medals in the FIBA World Cup. Also half of one of American sports' most prominent power couples, as the long-term partner (and now fiancée) of US women's soccer star Megan Rapinoe, and began appearing in commercials for national used-car dealer CarMax in 2021. Bird is also the oldest player ever to play in a full WNBA season; her final game in the 2022 playoffs was about six weeks before her 42nd birthday.note 
  • Tamika Catchings: A forward who spent her entire 15-season career with the Indiana Fever, Catchings was drafted #3 overall in 2001 out of Tennessee. She's one of the league's most decorated players—Rookie of the Year in 2002 (she missed the 2001 season with a torn ACL), MVP in 2011, a record 10 All-Star appearances, five-time Defensive Player of the Year, Finals MVP in 2012, named to the league's All-Decade Team in 2006 and Top 15 Team for the league's 15th anniversary in 2011.* Basically a stretch four, much like her contemporary Lauren Jackson and more recent players such as Elena Delle Donne and Candace Parker (all below). Catchings ended her career in 2016 as the league's all-time leader in rebounds and steals (the rebound record has since fallen twice, with Sylvia Fowles as the current leader), and #2 scorer, and made it to the Naismith and Women's Halls in 2020, by which time she had become the Fever's general manager (she stepped down from that role after the 2021 season). And back in high school, she became the first known player to manage a quintuple-double. (It's happened once more since.)
  • Cynthia Cooper: The league's first MVP and a member of both the Naismith and Women's Halls of Fame. A sixth woman at USC, she honed her skills in Italy before being assigned to the Houston Comets and proceeding to heck everyone's garbage up on her way to four straight titles before retiring in 2000. Her single-game scoring record (44) in the inaugural season stood for ten years. An all-around threat, though not a great pro coach. Now known by her married name of Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, she's since gone into college coaching, with two stints at Texas Southern (retiring from the last of these in 2022) sandwiched by a few years at her alma mater of USC.
  • Sylvia Fowles: Center for the Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx, drafted second overall by the Sky in 2008 from LSU, where she was the Southeastern Conference's all-time leading rebounder. Fowles quickly established herself as a solid scorer, tenacious rebounder, and elite defender, becoming a perennial All-Star and claiming the first two of her four Defensive Player of the Year nods. After seven seasons in Chicago, she had a contract dispute and sat out the first half of the 2014 season until she got traded to Minnesota, joining forces with Seimone Augustus, Maya Moore, and Lindsay Whalen to win WNBA titles in 2015 and 2017. Fowles was also Finals MVP in both seasons as well as league MVP in 2017. Not to mention that she got two more DPOY nods in 2016 and 2021. In 2020, she surpassed Rebekkah Brunson as the W's career rebounding leader, and ended her career in 2022 as the first W player with 4,000 career boards.
  • Becky Hammon: A point guard out of Colorado State who played 16 seasons in the league before retiring at the end of the 2014 season. Although small by WNBA standards (5'6"/1.68 m) and not exceptionally fast, she made up for her relative lack of physical skills with an extraordinary basketball IQ. Represented Russia internationally; that country was one of her many overseas stops during her career. A six-time All-Star, Hammon was named one of the league's 15 greatest players at its 15th anniversary in 2011. Before the end of her final season as a player, she made headlines when the San Antonio Spurs hired her as an assistant (effective at season's end). Hammon became the first woman to be a full-time coach in any of America's four major professional leagues and remained with the Spurs through the 2021–22 season, by which time she was increasingly being seen as a potential NBA head coach in the making. On New Year's Eve 2020, she became the first woman to act as an NBA head coach, taking over after Gregg Popovich was ejected from a game. Hammon returned to the W in 2022 to become head coach of the franchise where she had finished her playing career, now known as the Las Vegas Aces, and in her first season led the Aces to the league's best record, earning her Coach of the Year honors, following that up with the franchise's first WNBA title. This made her the W's first HC ever to win the title in her first season in the position.note  The Aces repeated as champs in 2023 under Hammon's watch. She entered the Women's Hall in 2022 and the Naismith Hall in 2023, in both cases as a player.
  • Chamique Holdsclaw: What Could Have Been in a smooth, athletic package with a knack for getting into small spaces. She came into the league in 1999 with high expectations after being part of three championship teams at Tennessee. Lingering knee and hamstring problems cut many of her seasons short, while battles with depression compounded by family tragedies left gaps in her career. You might not want to get into that last part with people.
  • Lauren Jackson: A versatile stretch four from Australia, she spent her entire WNBA career for the Seattle Storm, from her overall #1 selection in 2001 through 2012. An eight-time league MVP—three in the WNBA, four in the WNBL in her homeland, and one in the Korean league—basketball's definitely in her blood. Despite her many accomplishments, she was still an example of What Could Have Been, as she battled near-constant shin, ankle, and knee injuries throughout her career. Retired completely from basketball in 2016 after missing almost all of the previous two years to the aftereffects of a particularly bad knee injury, and made the Naismith and Women's Halls in 2021. However, Jackson ended up returning to play at age 40 in 2022 for her hometown team in Australia's second-level women's league in a bid to make the Aussie team for that year's FIBA World Cup in Australia. She made the team and picked up a bronze medal.
  • Lisa Leslie: One of the cornerstones of the Los Angeles Sparks if not the league itself, she was assigned to LA at the league's beginning- appropriate for an Angeleno who went to USC. For a fair chunk of the league's existence, she was one of the best players, and the best center, out there. A two-time champion, three-time MVP (in 2002, sweeping All-Star MVP, regular season MVP, and Finals MVP), many-time All-WNBA and All-Star, the league's all-time leading rebounder until Catchings passed her in her final season, and member of the Naismith and Women's Halls of Fame. Also notable for recording the first-ever dunk in a WNBA game. There are those who call her Lisamort, and those who call her the Diva, and those who... she has a lot of FanNicknames. Her number is retired and the Sparks' court is named after her; she later bought into the team as a part owner, but her group sold out in 2013 to a separate group that included Magic Johnson.
  • Maya Moore: Forward for the Minnesota Lynx, drafted #1 overall in 2011 out of UConn. She helped lead the Minnesota Lynx to their first WNBA championship in 2011 and won Rookie of the Year. She finished a close second to Candace Parker for the regular season MVP Award in 2013 but won the Finals MVP Award by helping lead Minnesota to their second title in franchise history. In 2015, she led the Lynx to a third WNBA title. Her career came to an untimely end for unusual reasons. She sat out the 2019 season to pursue personal interests (mainly related to Christian ministry) and pivoted to pursuing criminal justice reform. Moore never returned to play, formally announcing her retirement from basketball in 2023.
  • Cappie Pondexter: An explosive, offensive-minded guard who played for five WNBA teams in her career—the Phoenix Mercury, New York Liberty, Chicago Sky, Los Angeles Sparks, and Indiana Fever. Drafted #2 overall in 2006 out of Rutgers by Phoenix, she, Diana Taurasi, and the Mercury won two titles in three years... and then she demanded a trade, either because she wanted to be on the Liberty or because of her fashion business. Controversial among New York's faithful before being dealt to Chicago before the 2015 season, especially after making some unfortunate remarks after the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown in Japan. Pondexter stayed in Chicago for three years, but her numbers waned with age, and she moved to the Sparks in 2018, was released during the season, got picked up by the Fever, and retired after that season.
  • Sheryl Swoopes: One of the game's greats, originally assigned to the Houston Comets, later with the Seattle Storm and, after a two-year retirement, the Tulsa Shock for one final season in 2011. A brilliant defensive player and incredible slasher in her prime. Her marriage to her high school sweetheart and pregnancy with son Jordan was heavily marketed by the league. Revealed in 2005 that she was gay and in a relationship with her former assistant coach Alisa Scott. Now remarried to a man. If you're having trouble keeping up, you're not the only one. After retiring for good, she went into coaching; she had been the head coach at Loyola University Chicago before being fired during the 2016 offseason amid allegations of mistreatment of players. Entered the Naismith Hall in 2016 and the Women's Hall in 2017. Also of note is that she was the first WNBA player ever to collect a triple-double, and one of only four to have had more than one in the league;note  her other triple-double was the first (and for a long time only) one in playoff history.
  • Tina Thompson: A forward, she was the league's first-ever draft pick,note  chosen #1 overall in 1997 by Houston out of USC. She then signed with her hometown Sparks after the Comets folded, and then moved to the Storm after the 2011 season. Thompson was the last player from the WNBA's first season to be active in the league, finally retiring after the 2013 season as the league's all-time leading scorer (Diana Taurasi now leads in that statistic). Rarely seen without her lucky lipstick. Spent four years as head coach of Virginia before being shown the door after the 2021–22 season.
  • Teresa Weatherspoon: A fiery point guard, "Spoon" was assigned to the New York Liberty in 1997 and left there after the 2003 season. We do not discuss her 2004 season with the Sparks. Best known for her buzzer-beating halfcourt heave in Game 2 of the 1999 Finals to win the game for New York and extend the series; it was selected the greatest moment in league history during the 15th anniversary season of 2011. Coached at her alma mater, Louisiana Tech, for five seasons until being fired in 2014. Member of the Women's Hall since 2010 and Naismith Hall since 2019, and after four seasons as an assistant with the New Orleans Pelicans returned to the W after the 2023 season as the new head coach of the Chicago Sky.
  • Lindsay Whalen: Hall of Fame point guard for the Minnesota Lynx. Started out as the hometown hero of the University of Minnesota, where she graduated the all-time leading scorer. Known for her quiet yet machine-like consistency of play, she helped made women's college basketball popular in the state by bringing twice as many people to the arena during games. She won many college titles while playing. She was drafted #4 overall by the Connecticut Sun in 2004 and helped lead them to two Finals appearances, but was traded back to her home state of Minnesota in 2010 to play for the Lynx. In 2011, she helped lead the Lynx to their first title in WNBA history, followed by another three that decade before retiring in 2018 to immediately become the head coach at her alma mater of Minnesota, serving in that role for five seasons. She made the Naismith Hall in 2022 and the Women's Hall in 2023, in both cases as a player.

Current Players

  • Elena Delle Donne:* Perhaps the most positionally versatile player ever in the women's game, the Delaware product was drafted #2 overall in 2013. She spent her first four WNBA seasons with the Chicago Sky before being dealt to the Washington Mystics in the 2017 offseason, is listed as a guard and forward—despite being the size of most WNBA centers (6'5"/1.96 m). Center, power forward, small forward, shooting guard, point guard, swingman, stretch four, point forward, combo guard... you name it, EDD can play it. With her arrival, the Sky took multiple levels in badass and became legitimate title contenders... until the Fever swept them out in the first round. In 2013, EDD was the first rookie ever to be the top vote-getter for the All-Star Game and was also the unanimous choice for Rookie of the Year. In 2015, she led the league in scoring and free throw percentage (unheard of for center-sized players) and earned MVP honors. In 2017, she forced a trade to the Mystics, the closest team to her Delaware home (significance noted below) and led the team to its first-ever WNBA Finals berth in '18 and first title in '19. She was also league MVP in the latter season on the strength of the first 50–40–90 seasonnote  in league history. EDD, the first player to be named WNBA MVP for two different teams, is also the current career free-throw percentage leader in league history (and has a better percentage than anyone in NBA history by a fairly wide margin).note  Back problems mostly scuttled her 2021 season, but she came back strong in 2022 (with her minutes carefully managed). EDD has since announced she won't play in 2024, and her WNBA future is uncertain.
    • For the first few years of her WNBA career, she was one of the very few high-profile WNBA players who never played overseas. (She has publicly stated that she normally stays in the States to help care for her disabled older sister; her family ties were seen as playing a big part in her desire to move to Washington.) EDD did join a Chinese team for that country's 2017 playoffs, but a flareup of post-Lyme disease syndromenote  forced her to return prematurely to the States. Her Lyme disease history, which has left her seriously immunocompromised, meant that she sat out 2020 despite the league turning down her petition to skip the abbreviated season (the Mystics announced they would pay her anyway). With disability causes so close to her heart, she's also a high-profile ambassador for Special Olympics and is also heavily involved with Lyme disease charities.
  • Skylar Diggins-Smith: Was a superstar point guard at Notre Dame, where she graduated as the school's second-leading career scorer before being drafted #3 overall in 2013. Known for her charisma and good looks, Diggins (now Diggins-Smith) was hyped as the next great WNBA point guard after she was drafted by the then-Tulsa Shock in 2013. She got off to a slow start in her debut rookie season, shooting way below her points average from college, but lived up to expectations in 2014, being named first-team All-WNBA and the league's most improved player, as well as being an All-Star starter. Missed most of the 2015 season to a torn ACL, but came back strong, becoming another perennial All-Star. Another rare example of a WNBA star who doesn't play overseas, in her case because she has enough endorsement and outside business income to not need it, although she was considering playing in China in 2015–16 before her ACL injury. Missed the 2019 season while pregnant with her first child; when she became a free agent in 2020, the Wings sent her to the Mercury in a sign-and-trade deal during that offseason, getting three draft picks in return. After another maternity leave for her second child in 2023, she moved to the Storm.
  • Brittney Griner: Center for the Phoenix Mercury, drafted from Baylor #1 overall in 2013 after winning a national title being named consensus NCAA player of the year in her last two seasons. The 6'8" (2.03 m) Griner, known in college for her dominant shot-blocking and as one of the few women who can routinely dunk, entered the league with as much hype as any player in years. Also made headlines in 2013 when she came out as lesbian and had the league's top-selling jersey in her rookie season as well. A perennial All-Star, Griner led the league in blocks eight times, including her first seven straight seasons and has also led the league in scoring twice.
    • In 2022, Griner was found guilty of drug chargesnote  in Russia, where she had played during the WNBA offseason, and sentenced to 9 years in prison. This was widely viewed as a politically motivated move in the United States, as it coincided with the buildup to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and she indeed wound up being part of a US–Russia prisoner swap for an arms dealer, serving 10 months in all; she has since returned to playing for the Mercury. Griner's predicament made her a poster child for the league's salary issues. Since at least the 2010s (and probably longer), about 70% of the league's players go overseas to play during the traditional basketball season, with the biggest stars making several times what the WNBA can offer. While the newest WNBA collective bargaining agreement is attempting to address the issue by effectively forcing the league's players to stay stateside year-round starting in 2024,note  many commentators fear this may backfire by encouraging American players to say "Screw This, I'm Outta Here" to the W.
  • Sabrina Ionescu joined the league in 2020 as the face of American women's basketball, starting her pro career with the New York Liberty as the first overall pick out of Oregon and having already entered First-Name Basis.note  Unfortunately, her rookie season came to a premature end, as she went down with a severe ankle sprain in the Libs' third game in the COVID bubble. When the league came back to home markets in 2021, Sabrina didn't take long to have a signature moment. In her first game in Brooklyn, she sank a buzzer-beating game-winning three. Two games later, she became the youngest WNBA player to record a triple-double. However, she was still recovering from the previous season's injury, putting up solid but not spectacular numbers for the rest of the season. She still ended up with the league's top-selling jersey in 2021, also appearing in a couple of commercials for State Farm Insurance alongside NBA superstar PG Chris Paul. Finally fully healthy in 2022, Ionescu picked up where she left off after her 2020 injury, first becoming the most recent of four players with a second career triple-double (achieving that one while sitting out the fourth quarter) and then becoming the second after Candace Parker (below) with two triple-doubles in a season and three in a career. And also becoming the first W player ever with 500 points, 200 rebounds, and 200 assists in a season.note  In 2023, she set a new W single-season record for three-pointers (although the league's expansion to 40 games helped); blew away the field in the All-Star Game three-point contest, making all but two of her 30 final-round attempts for a record 37 points; and got her own signature shoe and apparel line from Nike, all being marketed as unisex.
  • Angel McCoughtry: Forward for the Las Vegas Aces who made her name with the Atlanta Dream, drafted #1 overall in 2009 out of Louisville. A slashing, high-scoring forward with a penchant for drawing fouls, and also a top-tier defender, she helped lead the Dream to playoff berths in all but one of her seasons in the ATL, including three Finals appearances (all losses). Missed the 2019 season to injury and moved to the Aces, helping them to a Finals appearance in her first season in Vegas... make that Bradenton.
  • Arike Ogunbowale: Shooting guard for the Dallas Wings, the Milwaukee native first made her name in college at Notre Dame, notably hitting not one but two buzzer-beaters to lead the Irish to the 2018 national title—the first a pull-up jumper from just inside the three-point line in overtime in the semifinals against UConn, and the second an off-balance running three-pointer to take down Mississippi State in the final. She parlayed those heroics into an appearance on Dancing with the Stars in that offseason, and went on to go fifth overall in the 2019 draft with the Wings. She quickly emerged as a star of the future, finishing third in scoring as a rookie (though Rookie of the Year honors would go to Napheesa Collier of the Lynx) and then leading the league in that category in 2020.
  • Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike: Sisters and Stanford products who both play forward for the Los Angeles Sparks.
    • Nneka, the older by two years and shorter by one inch (6'2"), was named Pac-10/Pac-12note  Player of the Year twice, and went #1 in the 2012 draft. She made an immediate impact, earning Rookie of the Year honors, and has since gone on to make the All-Star Game in each year it's been held in her career.note  In 2016, she took her game to a new level, leading the league in field goal percentage and setting personal highs in scoring, rebounds, and assists, earning MVP honors while leading the Sparks to the title. Since then, she's continued to play at All-Star level, and is also known for her Nice Gal image on-court, winning the league's sportsmanship award three times in a row (2019–2021). She was also one of two WNBA players featured in Space Jam: A New Legacy, voicing Arachnneka, a humanoid spider who played on the Goon Squad.
    • Chiney, through her first season in the WNBA, was almost a mirror image of Nneka—twice Pac-12 POY, #1 pick in the 2014 draft, an All-Star as a rookie, and Rookie of the Year. However, while at Stanford, she picked up one major honor that eluded her sister—the Wooden Award, one of the three major NCAA POY awards in the women's game. Unfortunately, she seems to have become a Glass Cannon. First, she tore her right ACL and missed the 2015 WNBA season, but came back strong enough in 2016 to earn that season's Comeback Player of the Year Award. She then went to play in China, where she hurt the Achilles in her other leg; she missed the 2017 WNBA season because of it. Chiney would recover from this setback, making another All-Star appearance in 2018. In the 2018–19 offseason, she was traded to the Sparks, reuniting her with her older sister; she then settled into the role of sixth woman. During the traditional basketball season, she's now an ESPN analyst; this enabled her to make the choice to sit out the 2020 season to more fully recover from past injuries. During that time, she also became the first black woman to host a national ESPN Radio program, teaming up with Mike Golic Jr. for the network's 3-hour afternoon drive-time* show. She's since become the face of an ad campaign for restaurant delivery company DoorDash.
  • Candace Parker: Forward for the Las Vegas Aces, drafted #1 overall in 2008 out of Tennessee by the Sparks, for whom she played until returning to her hometown of Chicago* as a free agent in the 2020–21 offseason. After two seasons with the Sky, she moved to Vegas as a free agent. Silky, smooth, and incredibly athletic... when not sidelined with injuries or pregnancy. Formerly married to NBA journeyman Shelden Williams; now in a same-sex marriage with Russian basketball player Anna Petrakova. She won the MVP Award in 2013. Kept out of the 2016 Olympics in Rio, in favor of Breanna Stewart, which caused some controversy. She finished the year strong, however, by winning her first WNBA title and Finals MVP. Parker has continued to play at a high level, earning Defensive Player of the Year honors in 2020, helping her hometown team to its first title in 2021, and in 2022 becoming the first player in league history to have recorded two triple-doubles in a single season (and also the first to have three career triple-doubles). She's also become part of the growing list of sportspeople who own shares in American soccer teams; Parker is a minority investor in Angel City FC, an LA-based team that started play in the National Women's Soccer League in 2022. Parker has also picked up enough big-name endorsements that she made Forbes magazine's 2021 list of the top 10 earners among female athletes worldwide.note  Most significantly, Parker was one of the cover athletes for NBA 2K22 (specifically a special edition marking the WNBA's 25th anniversary), making her the first woman ever to receive this spot on the popular video game.
  • Kelsey Plum: Drafted by the San Antonio Stars #1 overall in 2017 after breaking the D-I women's basketball all-time scoring record (since surpassed) while at Washington, the point guard made the move with the team when they moved to become the Las Vegas Aces the next year, sticking around as a core part of the team as they built towards their back-to-back titles in 2022-23.
  • Breanna Stewart: Stretch four for the Liberty, moving there as a free agent in 2023 after seven seasons with the Seattle Storm, which drafted her #1 overall in 2016 out of UConn. The 6'4" Stewie came into the league as perhaps even more hyped than the "Three to See"—led the Huskies to NCAA titles in each of her four seasons in Storrs, also being named the Final Four MVP in all four seasons; consensus national player of the year in her last two seasons (also winning a major national award as a sophomore); becoming a fixture on Team USA while still at UConn... you get the picture. After leading the league's rookies in scoring, rebounding, blocks, and minutes per game in 2016 (co-leader among all players in minutes, and in the top six in the other three categories), Stewart was the runaway Rookie of the Year, receiving all but one vote. Stewie didn't stop there, going on to earn season and Finals MVP honors in 2018 while leading the Storm to the title. Sadly, she missed the 2019 season to a torn Achilles suffered in the 2019 EuroLeague Women final. She would come back strong in 2020 with a season that put her in contention for another MVP trophy, though A'ja Wilson (below) beat her out for that honor; Stewie went on to claim Finals MVP again in a sweep of Wilson's Aces. During the 2020 season, she also became a very prominent social voice on racial and feminist causes—enough so that Sports Illustrated named her one of its five Sportspeople of the Year. She's since gotten a signature shoe thanks to a deal with Puma. When she announced her move to the Libs in 2023, she cited a wish to play in "the biggest market in all of sports". Given that she grew up in the Syracuse area, it's likely her ties to the state also played a part in her move.
    • Her injury made her another poster child for the league's salary issues. Even without the geopolitical risks (cf. Brittney Griner), another problem is that players who go overseas don't get any significant offseason. One ESPN writer noted shortly after Stewart's injury that in calendar 2018, she played in China, had little time off before the WNBA season, almost immediately followed that with duty for Team USA at the FIBA World Cup in Spain, and then had little downtime before going to play in Russia. The last time she'd had any real time off was in 2015, before her senior season at UConn.
  • Diana Taurasi: Guard for the Phoenix Mercury, drafted #1 overall in 2004 out of UConn. Hot-headed, foul-mouthed, charismatic, and exceedingly talented. She became the league's career scoring leader during the 2017 season, and was named the league's GOAT* by fans for the WNBA's 25th anniversary in 2021. Has gotten in a little bit of trouble, caught DUI in 2009 and implicated in steroid use (turned out to be a false positive from a sketchy lab). Sat out the 2015 WNBA season at the request of the Russian team she then played for during the traditional basketball season, which offered her a bonus well in excess of her WNBA salary to sit out.note  As noted above, she and Sue Bird became the first basketball players with five Olympic golds in 2021. Also portrayed a member of the Goon Squad in Space Jam: A New Legacy, voicing White Mamba, a humanoid snake that bears her nickname.
  • Alyssa Thomas: Forward for the Sun since 2014, when she was picked #4 overall out of Maryland, Thomas has become the most prominent among several players who became major triple-double threats in the post-COVID era—yes, even more so than Sabrina. For her first several seasons, she was a strong defender who regularly averaged double-figure points, but took major levels in badass in 2022. In that season, Thomas had four triple-doubles, two in the regular season and two in back-to-back Finals games, making her the W's career leader in that category and also the first ever to record one (much less two) in the Finals. The following year, she recorded six in the 2023 regular season and one more in the playoffs, and came pretty close to averaging a triple-double for the season. Not to mention that she led the league in rebounds. Thomas made All-WNBA both seasons (second team in 2022, first team in 2023), and narrowly lost out on the season MVP award to Stewie.note 
  • Courtney Vandersloot: Point guard for the Chicago Sky from 2011–2022 before signing with the Liberty as a free agent, Vandersloot has basically been the league's poster child for Overshadowed by Awesome and Dude, Where's My Respect?, despite currently standing as the league's all-time leader in assists per game.* A native of the Seattle area, she wasn't seen has a big-time recruit out of high school, ending up on the other side of the Cascades at Gonzaga. After leading the Zags to a surprise run to the NCAA regional finals in her 2010–11 senior season, and becoming the first NCAA player (male or female) with 2,000 points and 1,000 assists in a career (since joined by Sabrina),note  the Sky made her the third pick in that year's draft. Sloot made an immediate impact, making the All-Star Game and the All-Rookie team... though in a harbinger of things to come, she happened to join the league at the same time as Maya Moore. With other big names at her position, most notably Sue Bird and Skylar Diggins-Smith, she didn't make another All-Star team for a while. Despite leading the league in assists in 2015. Then setting a new league record for assists per game in 2017. And another in 2018. She finally got her second All-Star nod in 2019, with a third straight assists record to boot. Sloot at long last got some real attention in 2020, when she set yet another assists record. Through 2023, she has the top six seasons in per-game assists in league history. On top of that, she joined Sheryl Swoopes in the exclusive club of WNBA players with multiple triple-doubles, posting one in the 2018 regular season and one in the 2021 playoffs. Further developing the "overshadowed" theme, she didn't make the 2016 US Olympic team, and given USA Basketball's long track record of demonstrating loyalty to established players, wound up opting to play internationally for Hungary in 2017, believing (not without reason) that she'd never get to play for Team USA in her prime. Also in a same-sex marriage, in her case with former Sky backcourt mate Allie Quigley, with some fans calling them "The VanderQuigs".
  • A'ja Wilson: Power forward for the Las Vegas Aces and a rising face of the league. The 6'4" Wilson grew up in a small South Carolina town not far from the state capital of Columbia, and went to that city to play under Hall of Fame guard Dawn Staley at South Carolina, leading the Gamecocks to a national title in 2017 and sweeping all major NCAA player of the year awards the next season. Carolina has since put up a statue of her in front of its arena. After going #1 overall to the Aces in the 2018 draft, she lived up to her billing, being named Rookie of the Year and making the All-Star Game. Wilson further cemented her status in the 2020 bubble, averaging over 20 points and 8 rebounds, leading the league in blocks, and being named league MVP. She would be named MVP again in 2022 and go on to collect her first championship ring, and was Finals MVP in the Aces' successful repeat in 2023. And yes, her first name does come from the Steely Dan album... actually, its title track, as it was her father's favorite song.

    Others 

The international women's game

The USA was late to the party when it came to founding a stable league, and still competes with European leagues for the full attention of elite players.note  Most players spend their winters in Europe to supplement their incomes and stay sharp. Between 1981 and 1996, Europe, Asia, and South America offered the only options for a woman who wanted to keep playing. The pecking order of leagues is fluid; currently the most prestigious and lucrative include Russia, Turkey, and in very recent years China. You can also find W players, alumnae, and hopefuls in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Israel, Australia, and other countries.

In international play, the US is the heavyweight, rarely contested. The game has a presence in several other countries, though:

  • Australia: The Opals have been one of the most consistent sides in the world in the last fifteen years, but haven't been able to finish the job. Known for Lauren Jackson, Penny Taylor, and bodysuits.
  • Brazil: The gender dynamic of basketball and soccer is, for the most part, reversed between Brazil and the US, which has resulted in Brazil being a world power in women's basketball for a looooong time. Like other Brazilian athletes, they are best known by their first names or nicknames ("apelidos"). Their legends include Magic Paula (real name Maria Paula da Silva, and yes, the nickname comes from Earvin Johnson's), Hortência Marcari and Janeth Arcain; current stars include Érika de Souza and Damiris Dantas.
  • The USSR/Russia: The Unified Team brought back Olympic gold in 1992, spurring the development of the US national team. Russia is still a power on the world stage, though they haven't developed their young talent in recent years.
  • France: Not historically a powerhouse, but came out of nowhere to win their group and take silver at the 2012 Olympics, and picked up bronze in the 2020 (21) Olympics. They've developed a bad case of Every Year They Fizzle Out at the continental level, losing in the final in the each edition of EuroBasket Women from 2013–2021 and finishing third in the 2023 edition.
  • Spain: Also not a historic powerhouse, but also came out of nowhere to win their group and take silver at the 2014 World Championship. Following a silver at the 2016 Olympics and bronze at the 2018 World Cup, not to mention three EuroBasket Women titles in the 2010s, they've established themselves as a major European power, though France, Serbia, and Belgium (the latter two respectively being 2021 and 2023 EuroBasket Women winners) are pushing them strongly.

The Harlem Globetrotters

An equal-parts absolute anomaly and wholehearted-tribute to the sport of basketball, the Globetrotters are a purely-exhibition team, which mixes athletic talent with comedic routines. The team is not actually from Harlem either in foundation (Chicago) or current home base (Atlanta); the name was instead selected to denote that the team consisted entirely of African-American players, as Harlem was seen as a center for African-American culture when the team was founded in the 1920s. The team has played thousands of games since, including exhibition games against NBA teams, and several of the team's players (such as Naismith Hall of Fame inductees Meadowlark Lemon and Curly Neal) were as famous as their NBA counterparts during their heyday. More info on the real-life team can be found on The Other Wiki; what we have here on them is a cartoon and a pinball table.

The Washington Generals

The Globetrotters' former rivals, the Washington Generals (now owned by the Globetrotters themselves). While the Generals have become famous for being losers, they did have one recorded win in 1971 under the name the New Jersey Reds (one of several names the Generals alternated in 1971 and 1972 in an attempt to make it look like there were more teams in the "league" the Trotters "played" in). Despite the close relation between the two teams, the Generals were in fact independently owned for most of their existence (specifically by their founder Red Klotz and his family). In 2015, the Trotters ended their contract with the Generals, causing the latter team to fold. In 2017, the Trotters' parent company bought the Generals name from the Klotz estate and relaunched them as an independent, wholly-legitimate exhibition team separate from the Trotters.

The Basketball Tournament

The Basketball Tournament (TBT) is a summer men's tournament in the US that's steadily increased in popularity since its first edition in 2014. It started out with 32 teams, but has since settled into a 64-team format. Much like the NCAA tournaments, it's a knockout tournament that starts with regional play before the regional survivors assemble for a single-site championship event. One of TBT's more notable features is its winner-take-all prize—initially $500,000, it increased to $2 million before COVID-19 led to it being knocked back to $1 million.

As noted above, its base rule set is that of the NCAA, but has several key differences:

  • Games are played in 9-minute quarters instead of the 10-minute quarters of NCAA women's basketball or the 20-minute halves of NCAA men's basketball.
  • Players foul out after their sixth personal foul (same as the NBA and WNBA), instead of their fifth.
  • Bonus free throws follow NCAA women's rules (which are the same as FIBA's) — after the fifth team foul in a quarter, the non-fouling team gets two free throws. The "one-and-one" of NCAA men's play (and, before 2023–24, NFHS play), in which the shooter must make the first free throw to get the second, does not exist.
    • An exception to this applies during the Elam Ending (see below). Any foul that would result in bonus free throws will instead give the non-fouling team one free throw and possession. This was introduced in 2020 in order to eliminate an incentive for teams to foul in one specific situation—when the defensive team could reach the target score with a free throw or two-point basket while the offense needed a three-pointer.
  • The Elam Ending is TBT's most distinctive, and indeed iconic, feature. At the first dead ball with 4 minutes or less remaining in the fourth quarter, the game clock is turned off. At that point, a "target score" is set by adding a specified number of points to the score of the leading team (or tied teams). Initially, 7 points were added; since 2019, 8 points have been added. The game then continues with no game clock but with a shot clock, and the first team to meet or exceed the target score wins, thus eliminating overtime. The NBA All-Star Game adopted the Elam Ending starting in 2020 with a slightly different procedure (setting the target score at the end of the third quarter and adding 24),note  but ditched it for 2024 and beyond. The Canadian Elite Basketball League used the Elam Ending in a 2020 tournament that took the place of its COVID-canceled season, using the TBT procedure but adding 9 points to set the target score, and made this permanent when normal league play resumed in 2021. The NBA G League adopted the Elam Ending with a twist in 2022–23. First, overtime in all regular-season games is now played under Elam Ending conditions, with the target score set by adding 7 points to the final score in regulation. Second, games in December's G League Winter Showcase use the same format as the NBA All-Star Game used to, but with the target score set by adding 25 to the leading score after 3 quarters.

Teams are chosen via an application process, though the organizers extend invitations to all teams that won first-round games in the previous edition. While active NBA players are contractually prohibited from playing in TBT (mostly due to injury risk), a few have served as team sponsors. Many players from overseas leagues will play in TBT while in the US for their summer break. TBT is especially noted for "alumni teams"—teams made up mostly or entirely of players who attended a specific college. Of the seven teams that have won TBT titles, five were alumni teams. For example, in the 2022 edition, 27 of the 64 teams were single-school alumni teams, and six others were drawn from groups of schools sharing a common bond.note  A number of other teams, including the 2023 champs, promote a charity.

After each game, the winning team advances its placard on a giant bracket, resembling that found in the first Karate Kid film. After pleas from several prominent sports journalists, the NCAA adopted this ritual starting with the 2018 tournament, bringing a portable bracket into each winning team's locker room to allow the team to advance its placard on said bracket.

More info on TBT can be found on The Other Wiki.

TBT champions by year

  • 2014: Notre Dame Fighting Alumni
  • 2015: Overseas Elite
  • 2016: Overseas Elite
  • 2017: Overseas Elite
  • 2018: Overseas Elite
  • 2019: Carmen's Crew — Ohio State alumni team; the name comes from the school song "Carmen Ohio"
  • 2020: Golden Eagles – Marquette alumni team
  • 2021: Boeheim's Army – Syracuse alumni team, named in honor of longtime Orange head coach Jim Boeheimnote 
  • 2022: Blue Collar U – Buffalo alumni team
  • 2023: Team Heartfire – promotes a charity that organizes Christian medical missions

3x3

Officially pronounced "three-ex-three" (though "three-on-three" and, less often, "three-by-three" see informal use), this is FIBA's version of the 3-on-3 halfcourt game. While high-level 3-on-3 competitions have existed in the US since the 1970s, it wasn't until the current century that FIBA started its own competitions in that format. It was first tested in 2007 at the Asian Indoor Games in Macau; two more test events were held before the official launch in 2009 at the Asian Youth Games in Singapore. The first worldwide competition was at the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics, also in Singapore. The first FIBA World Cup was held in 2012; it was originally held every two years, but became an annual affair from 2016 (though COVID-19 scuttled both the 2020 and 2021 editions). The 2020 (21) Tokyo Olympics were the first Summer Games to feature this variant. The original name was FIBA 33, taking its name from both the 3-on-3 concept and the fact that games ended when one team scored 33 points. However, by the time official competition started, the name was changed to 3x3, with several distinctive rule changes.

3x3 differs dramatically from the standard full-court game—and not just because of the reduced number of players.

  • The official court, used in sanctioned competitions, is actually not half of a standard FIBA court. It's the same width as a standard court (15 m), but is only 11 m long (as opposed to 14 m for a standard half court). The court markings are the same as those of the FIBA court.
  • Rosters are four players.
  • The ball used is unique to 3x3. It's the same circumference as the "size 6" women's ball (28.5 in/70 cm), but is the same mass as the "size 7" men's ball (22 oz/620 g).
  • There is no jump ball at any time in the game. Instead of a jump ball to start the game, the first possession is decided by a pregame coin toss. The winner can choose to take possession at the start of the game, or at the start of a potential overtime.
  • Game play starts with the defensive team giving the ball to the offense behind the arc. This procedure is also used after a dead ball. After a made basket or free throw (provided that the non-scoring team will receive possession), play starts with a player taking the ball under the basket. The ball must be moved outside the arc by dribbling or passing before a shot can be taken.
  • The "alternating possession" rule of most full-court rule sets does not exist. In any held ball situation, the defensive team is awarded possession.
  • Substitution can only take place on a dead ball, as in the full-court game. However, unlike the full-court game, no action by game or bench officials is needed. All that's needed is for the departing player to step across the "half-court" line and make physical contact with the substitute.
  • Scoring is very different from that of the full-court game. Free throws are worth 1 point, as in the standard game, but a standard basket is 1 point instead of 2. Shots from behind the "three-point" line are worth 2 points instead of 3.
  • The shot clock is 12 seconds.
  • If the defense gains possession of the ball inside the arc by a steal, block, or rebound, it must move the ball outside the arc before being allowed to take a shot.
  • Players cannot foul out—personal foul counts are not kept. They can still be ejected if they commit two unsportsmanlike fouls (equivalent to the NBA's flagrant 1) or one disqualifying foul (flagrant 2).
  • As in the full-court game, a shooter who is fouled while missing a shot attempt gets a number of free throws equal to the value of the missed shot—1 if inside the arc, and 2 if outside the arc. Usually (see below).
  • Also as in the full-court game, technical fouls award 1 shot to the non-offending team, and unsportsmanlike and disqualifying fouls 2 shots plus possession.
  • Team foul counts are kept, and the rules surrounding foul counts and bonus free throws differ in several ways from those in the full-court game:
    • A technical foul adds 1 to the offending team's foul count. An unsportsmanlike or disqualifying foul adds 2 fouls.
    • On a team's 7th, 8th, and 9th fouls (if not offensive fouls), the fouled player gets 2 free throws. This includes fouls in the act of shooting, regardless of the result or location of the shot.
    • The 10th and all subsequent fouls (if not offensive) result in 2 free throws and possession, again including fouls on shot attempts, whether made or missed.
  • Games last 10 minutes, but end by rule once either team reaches 21 points.
  • A tied game goes to an untimed overtime, with the shot clock enforced. The first possession in overtime goes to the team that started the game on defense. Overtime ends once either team scores 2 points in overtime. Note that if the score at the end of regulation is 20–20, reaching 21 will not end the game—2 points must be scored.

Alternative Title(s): Harlem Globetrotters

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