Basketball Firsts — Trivia Every Fan Should Know
Every pub quiz and group chat eventually arrives at "who was the first to…". Arm yourself. These are the firsts that built basketball, in roughly chronological order.
Origins
The game itself: invented in December 1891 by Dr. James Naismith at a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA — thirteen rules, two peach baskets, and a soccer ball. The first professional league followed within a decade, but the lineage that matters runs through 1946: the first BAA/NBA game, played in Toronto (a nice trivia twist — the league's first game was in Canada), where Ossie Schectman scored the first basket.
Integration and pioneers
1950 brought three linked firsts: Chuck Cooper the first Black player drafted, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton the first to sign a contract, and Earl Lloyd the first to play a game — schedule order, not hierarchy, decided who stepped on court first. A generation later, Bill Russell became the NBA's first Black head coach (1966) — while still playing, and winning titles in both jobs.
Scoreboard firsts
- First MVP award: Bob Pettit (1956).
- First (and only) rookie to win MVP: Wilt Chamberlain (1960). Wes Unseld matched the double in 1969.
- First three-pointer in NBA history: Chris Ford of the Celtics, opening night 1979 — the same season Magic and Bird arrived. Quite a night for the future of the sport.
- First unanimous MVP: Stephen Curry (2016). Decades of legends, zero unanimous ballots, until him.
The international firsts
- First players born outside the US date to the league's founding era, but the modern pipeline's milestones are sharper: Hakeem Olajuwon the first foreign-born #1 pick of the modern era (1984), Dirk Nowitzki the first European MVP (2007), and the Jokić/Giannis/Embiid run that made foreign-born MVPs the norm — by the mid-2020s the award had stayed overseas for the better part of a decade.
- First #1 pick who never played US college or high school basketball: Yao Ming (2002), the draft's globalisation in one name.
Modern-era firsts
The play-in tournament (2020 bubble, formalised after), the in-season tournament and its first cup (2023, won by the Lakers), the first 70-point games of the new scoring boom — proof the "firsts" list is still being written.
Why firsts matter for basketbadle
Honour lists in Hoop Grid — MVPs, #1 picks, champions — are literally lists of firsts and their heirs. The fan who knows who opened each door tends to know everyone who walked through it. That's the whole trick to the hardest grids.