Toronto Huskies
The Maple Leafs were in first place, the football season was in full swing, and the local sports calendar was mighty crowded. So forgive Toronto for treating a moment of history as a mere curiosity. On November 1, 1946, the Toronto Huskies opened the inaugural season of the Basketball Association of America at Maple Leaf Gardens, playing the New York Knickerbockers on a newly constructed wooden floor and showing off a radical innovation - transparent backboards. Fifty-five years before, basketball had been invented by a Canadian, Dr. James Naismith, and was popular in schools and at the YMCA. Ads for the first Huskies' game touted it as the "World's Most Popular Sport!" and "King Basketball - Canada's Own Sport." But this new, professional version of the game was alien to the city, and only 7,090 fans, not all of them paying customers, turned out to watch the Huskies lose 68-66. "On the play our Huskies appeared short on both conditioning and competition," the Toronto Star reported. The losing would continue. A month into the season, player-coach "Big" Ed Sadowski, a future all-star, was gone, and by the following spring, after finishing last, so was the franchise, having cost its owners $100,000 in losses. But history was indeed made that first night. Though there were professional basketball teams in the United States dating all the way back to 1895, and other leagues had come and gone, the National Basketball Association - which was created when the BAA merged with the rival National Basketball League in 1949 - considers the first Huskies game as the first in its history. And Frank Biasatti from Windsor, Ont., the only Canadian on the floor that night, is recorded as the NBA's first "international" player. Other basketball games were played at Maple Leaf Gardens through the years, including many appearances by the Harlem Globetrotters, a series of regular season Buffalo Braves NBA games, college exhibitions, the 1994 World Basketball Championship, and occasional appearances by the Toronto Raptors before the construction of the Air Canada Centre.
-Stephen Brunt
Plaque via Alan L. Brown's site Toronto Plaques. Full page here.