The National Basketball Association (NBA) is an American professional basketball league for men and women. It is one of four major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada. The NBA is a franchise-based league with 30 teams, 29 of which are located in the United States and one in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The NBA is headquartered in New York City. It was founded in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America and merged with the rival National Basketball League in 1949.
The NBA has a long and storied history of being the top-tier league for the sport of basketball in North America. It has featured some of the biggest names in professional sports, including legendary players such as Bill Russell, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, and Jerry West. The NBA is a for-profit, professional sports league with two primary sources of revenue: Basketball Related Income (BRI) and television rights. BRI includes ticket sales and concessions, TV rights to broadcast games, merchandising rights for jerseys and other items, and fees paid to the league by its teams for playing in arenas.
In addition, the NBA has a strong international presence and is a popular sport in many countries around the world. This makes the NBA one of the most global of the four major professional sports leagues in the world.
In this article, we will explore the organization of the NBA under state law and analyze its legal form to better understand the ramifications of its organizational structure for the owners who control its member team-owners. This is important because the NBA’s form as an association will affect its rights and duties to its members. In particular, if the NBA is found to be a joint venture partnership under state organization law—an association of team-owners that has come together to pursue a limited scope business for profit—then its members would have fiduciary duties to each other and could seek judicial expulsion from a recalcitrant member.
Each year, the NBA playoffs feature eight teams from each conference that play a best-of-seven series to determine which two teams will face off in the championship final. The first team that wins four games will win the NBA title and receive the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy. In addition to this best-of-seven format, the NBA also uses a unique system of seeding that is designed to ensure that all teams have a reasonable chance of winning the championship. This is done by allocating a team’s regular season record to a number that corresponds to its ranking in the conference. In addition, division winners are guaranteed a top-three seed. This has made for some very interesting match-ups over the years.