Pittsburgh Pirates (NBL)

The Pittsburgh Pirates were an American professional basketball team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The team was one of the thirteen founding members of the National Basketball League, which formed in 1937.

Franchise history

The team was founded in 1937 as one of the founding teams of the National Basketball League. The team never played in the playoffs in their three seasons on the league. From inception and through its first 2 seasons the team was named the "Pirates" until the franchise was inactivated from the summer of 1939 until the summer of 1944, reappearing as the Pittsburgh Raiders for a final season in 1944–45. Despite them leaving the NBL, the Raiders would still participate in the 1946 World Professional Basketball Tournament as an independent team, with the NBL even being interested in bringing back the Pittsburgh franchise for the 1946–47 season at one point in time before a new team in Toledo, Ohio called the Toledo Jeeps essentially bought out the NBL spot that would have been for the Raiders, which subsequently ended any future attempts for the NBL to return to the city of Pittsburgh. Even with that in mind, the Raiders would still exist as a franchise until 1950, with later years for them as a franchise having them exist in a minor basketball league of sorts called the AAL for a few seasons before disbanding for good due to how great the competitive scale had grown with the newly-formed National Basketball Association taking shape as a professional basketball league.