🏀 The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the premier professional basketball league in the world, and one of the four major sports leagues in North America – alongside American Football 🏈, Baseball ⚾️ and Ice Hockey 🏒. See below for the latest NBA Predictions from the Algorithm.
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The league is made up of thirty teams — twenty-nine in the United States and one in Canada — split into the Eastern and Western Conferences. Each team plays an 82-game regular season before the leading sides advance to the play-offs, a series of best-of-seven rounds that culminates in the NBA Finals, where the champions lift the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy.
HISTORY
The NBA was founded in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America, adopting its current name in 1949 after merging with the rival National Basketball League. Over the following decades it grew from a modest American competition into a global phenomenon, its popularity carried by a succession of icons — Bill Russell, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James among them — and today it draws players and supporters from every corner of the world.
The Boston Celtics are the most successful franchise in the league’s history with eighteen championships, one clear of the Los Angeles Lakers on seventeen; between them the two clubs have shaped much of the NBA’s story. In recent seasons, though, the story has been one of remarkable parity. That reached a new peak in 2026, when the New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs to claim their first title since 1973, ending a 53-year drought and making it eight different champions in eight seasons — the longest such run in league history. See below for the latest Basketball Predictions, along with baseball, football and rugby elsewhere on the site.
