What was the score of the first ever basketball game?

Modern basketball teams can score more than 100 points in a night. So you would expect the very first game to have been at least a respectable shootout. Instead, it finished with a scoreline that would embarrass a football match.

The short answer

The first basketball game ended 1-0. It was played on 21 December 1891 at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the only goal was scored by William R. Chase.

The real story

The game was invented by Dr James Naismith, a physical education instructor at the school. His boss, Dr Luther Gulick, asked him to come up with an indoor game to keep students active through the long New England winter. Naismith wrote 13 rules and nailed two peach baskets high on the walls, about 10 feet up, partly to reduce injuries around the goals.

The equipment was improvised. The ball was a soccer ball, chosen because Naismith thought it was reasonably safe to throw around. The players were a class of 18 students, split into two teams of nine.

Here is why the score was so low. You could not run with the ball. Under Rule 3, a player had to throw it from where he caught it, and most fouls in that first game were for running with the ball. Players were also focused on individual glory rather than passing. And every time someone did score, play stopped: the baskets held the ball, so someone had to climb a ladder and fetch it out. Later the bottoms were removed or holes were cut so the ball could be poked out with a stick.

Chase’s winning shot is reported to have come from about 25 feet. Not bad with a soccer ball and a fruit basket.

The rules had other quirks too. If one side committed three fouls in a row, the opponents were awarded a goal. In a game this tight, that could have decided the whole thing, but in the end Chase’s shot was the only score anyone needed.

The twist is how quickly everything changed. Metal hoops, nets and backboards arrived by 1906. The first public game was played in March 1892.

Why people get it wrong

We picture early basketball as a rough draft of today’s game, with fewer stars but the same flow. In reality it was a different sport: no running with the ball, no backboards, lots of players crowding the floor, and a ladder break after every goal. Those rules made scoring genuinely hard.

There is also a natural assumption that games start out simple and high-scoring, then get more defensive as tactics improve. Basketball started out low-scoring precisely because its first rules made every goal so hard to earn.

“First game in history, eighteen blokes, one goal, and a ladder. Honestly, sounds like my Saturday mornings.”