So this isn't going to be about the Chiefs.
I'm awake in bed at night thinking about how the leagues were named.
You've got your National Football League. National Hockey League.
So you'd think we'd have the National Baseball League and the National Basketball League. But instead of 2 NBLs, we have zero.
Back in 1876, we had the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. As much fun as it is to tune into a NLPBBC game, it got shortened to National League. Once the AL came around, they just called the whole thing Major League Baseball. It's always annoyed me when writing about it that in any other sport you can refer to "the league" to talk about all teams at once, and you can't do that for baseball. They don't even have a term for the whole thing. On ESPN, for NFL standings, they have division, conference, league. For MLB, they have division, league, overall.
So NBL was open for basketball, but in 1948 they started the Basketball Association of America. My inference is that they didn't envision themselves as fully baked as a league, so they had a looser term of association. But the association part stuck, when it was later renamed NBA.
More interesting things along these lines:
ReplyDeleteThe North American Soccer League that eventually got replaced by Major League Soccer which was actually a company formed from Major League Professional Soccer.
The National Hockey Association was the predecessor of the National Hockey League, so in a parallel universe your post could have been about how it's weird that we have two associations (basketball and hockey) instead of two leagues :P
And finally, I find it amusing that none of our sports leagues mention the country at all. In some cases the sports are very US-centric, but even so. I'm curious (and too lazy to check) if other countries are the opposite. For instance, for football, most of them have their country's name in the name of the league (despite the wikipedia page title, the article mentions other football leagues around the world): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_and_Canadian_football_leagues