List of defunct NBA teams
The National Basketball Association is a professional men's basketball league, consisting of thirty teams in North America. The NBA was founded in New York City on June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America. It adopted the name National Basketball Association at the start of the 1949–50 season when it absorbed the National Basketball League. The NBA is an active member of USA Basketball, which is recognized by the International Basketball Federation as the National Governing Body for basketball in the country. The league is considered to be one of the four major professional sports leagues of North America.
There have been 15 defunct NBA franchises, of which nine played in only one NBA season. The Anderson Packers, the original Denver Nuggets, the Indianapolis Jets, the Sheboygan Red Skins, and the Waterloo Hawks had played in the NBL before joining the NBA, while the original Baltimore Bullets had played in the American Basketball League before joining the BAA/NBA. The Packers, Red Skins, and Waterloo Hawks left the NBA for the National Professional Basketball League, and are the only defunct teams to have ceased to exist in a league outside of the NBA. The original Bullets were the last defunct team to leave the NBA, having folded during the 1954–55 season, and are the only defunct team to have won an NBA championship. The Chicago Stags, the Indianapolis Olympians, the Cleveland Rebels, the Packers, and the Red Skins qualified for the playoffs in every year they were active in the league.
In addition to the 15 defunct BAA/NBA teams that did play in the league, there were also eight teams that were initially planned to join the BAA/NBA at various stages of the league's existence that ultimately never came to pass for one reason or another, with six of them being charter or expansion franchises to the league in question and two teams that were planned to join from other professional basketball leagues. Two franchises that were planned to be charter members for the BAA out in Buffalo and Indianapolis dropped out of the league almost immediately after their inaugural meeting was completed. Four other teams that were planned to exist at various points in the NBA's history as expansion franchises, but they never made it through as proper franchises in the NBA for one reason or another. The seventh that was planned for the NBA, the Oshkosh All-Stars, were planned to move to Milwaukee to become the Milwaukee All-Stars for the 1949–50 NBA season following the official merger of the BAA and the older National Basketball League, which the All-Stars were a part of throughout their Oshkosh history, but the All-Stars reneged on their plans to move to Milwaukee and left the NBA by September 3, 1949 to play for the much smaller and more local-based Wisconsin State Basketball League instead, which affected the overall structure of that specific season for the NBA in the process. The eighth and final team that was planned for the NBA, the Cleveland Pipers, had planned to jump from the second rendition of the American Basketball League after winning its only championship there and merge operations with the Kansas City Steers if they had been approved for entry into the NBA, but they were ultimately rejected and instead folded operations soon afterward.
Among cities that have hosted defunct NBA franchises, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. all currently have an NBA team, while Providence, Anderson and Sheboygan are all close to an hour away from a market with an NBA franchise and Pittsburgh is two hours away from an NBA franchise. St. Louis and Buffalo would receive replacement franchises that would later relocate.