This Brief identifies and contrasts the groups of National Basketball Association (NBA) expansion franchises and of any teams that relocated from one metropolitan area or city to another from 1950 to 2013. It discusses historical differences and similarities in the teams’ markets and performances and then as members of divisions and conferences. It measures and compares the emergence, development, and success of the teams by analyzing demographic, economic and sport-specific data. It also discusses the respective mergers of the Basketball Association of America and National Basketball League in 1949, and the American Basketball Association and National Basketball Association in 1976. National Basketball Association Strategies makes an important, relevant, and useful contribution to the literature regarding professional sports operations and to the NBA’s short and long run business strategies in American culture. Besides numerous sports fans within metropolitan areas and extended markets of these NBA teams, the book’s audiences are sports historians and researchers, college and public libraries, and current and potential NBA franchise owners and team executives. This Brief may also be used as a reference or supplemental text for college and university students enrolled in such applied undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars as sports administration, sports business, and sports management.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.

This book examines the development and organization of the NBA and its clubs, how each club has performed in seasons and postseasons, and to what extent each has prospered and succeeded as a business enterprise despite competition for market share from other types of entertainment. Each chapter contains two core themes—Team Performance and Franchise Business. The former highlights how teams won division and conference titles and NBA championships while the latter analyzes and compares financial data including revenue, gate receipts, and operating income. The book also explores such things as when each franchise organized and why it joined the NBA, a brief profile of its current majority owner or ownership group, records of teams’ special coaches and players, attendances at home games, and how their arenas rank as venues for fans. This book explains why particular teams located in very large, large, midsized, or small markets win more games and titles than others and when and how frequently this occurs. In addition, it provides ways to individually—and by division or conference—compare basketball franchises from a financial perspective.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is widely recognized as an entertaining and innovative league whose teams play regular season and postseason games in packed arenas at home and away sites in the United States and Canada. This book discusses the development, growth, and success of the 61-year-old NBA from a business perspective. Covering the late 1940s to 2009, it focuses on the league's expansions and mergers, team territories and relocations, franchise organizations and operations, basketball arenas and markets, and NBA domestic and international affairs. Readers will gain an insight into when, how, and why the NBA emerged, reformed, and gradually matured to become one of the world's most dominant, prosperous, and popular professional sports organizations today.

Today's National Basketball Association commands millions of spectators worldwide, and its many franchises are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But the league wasn't always so successful or glamorous: in the 1940s and 1950s, the NBA and its predecessor, the Basketball Association of America, were scrambling to attract fans. Teams frequently played in dingy gymnasiums, players traveled as best they could, and their paychecks could bounce higher than a basketball. How did the NBA evolve from an obscure organization facing financial losses to a successful fledgling sports enterprise by 1960? Drawing on information from numerous archives, newspaper and periodical articles, and Congressional hearings, The Rise of the National Basketball Association chronicles the league's growing pains from 1946 to 1961. David George Surdam describes how a handful of ambitious ice hockey arena owners created the league as a way to increase the use of their facilities, growing the organization by fits and starts. Rigorously analyzing financial data and league records, Surdam points to the innovations that helped the NBA thrive: regular experiments with rules changes to make the game more attractive to fans, and the emergence of televised sports coverage as a way of capturing a larger audience. Notably, the NBA integrated in 1950, opening the game to players who would dominate the game by the end of the 1950sdecade: Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Oscar Robertson. Long a game that players loved to play, basketball became a professional sport well supported by community leaders, business vendors, and an ever-growing number of fans.

For most of its existence, the National Basketball Association was a league filled with (almost) all American-born players. Players from overseas were looked at as less-skilled and not worth the risk. Americans playing overseas were looked at as those who couldn’t cut it in the NBA, now playing in, essentially, the minor leagues of basketball. But that’s no longer the case. Today, a full one-third of those in the league were born overseas. Out are the days of foreign-born players from unknown countries sitting at the end of the bench. Now, they’re the face of the franchise. A lottery draft pick. They are carrying the game into the new millennium. So the question remains: what brought about this change? How did the skillsets of players born overseas become comparable to those in the states? In The (Inter) National Basketball Association, author Joel Gunderson explores how the international game has become so integral to the growth of the NBA. It’s not, as former commissioner David Stern described at the 1985 NBA Draft, “America’s Game.” No longer does Team USA expect to steamroll through the Olympics. With stars such as Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece), Luka Doncic (Slovenia), Joel Embiid (Cameroon), Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia), and many more, the game of basketball has become a universal language. With almost forty different countries represented in the National Basketball Association today, the evolution of the sport has transcended across international waters. Teams no longer shy away from players born abroad, but instead welcome them with open arms. And for those who come over, not knowing the language, unfamiliar with the American lifestyle, they are now arriving with fluency in the most important language: basketball.

The book focuses on, identifies, and analyzes various divisions and conferences of four professional sports leagues and their teams' historical regular season and postseason performances, and also provides a recent financial profile of them while being competitive, profitable or unprofitable, and well-known enterprises. The parent sports organizations are the American League and National League in Major League Baseball, American Football Conference and National Football Conference in the National Football League, and the Eastern and Western Conference each in the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League.

This Brief identifies and contrasts the groups of expansion franchises and any teams that relocated from one metropolitan area or city to another within the National Football League (NFL) during three distinct periods from 1920 to 2013. It discusses historical differences and similarities between the teams’ markets and performances before 1933 and then as members of the NFL’s divisions and conferences. It measures and compares the emergence, development and success of the teams by analyzing demographic, economic and sport-specific data. It also discusses the NFL’s mergers with the All American Football Conference (1950) and American Football League (1970), outlining the reasons for and consequences of these mergers as well as their significance for sports fans and markets. The book makes an important, relevant and useful contribution to the literature regarding professional sports operations and to the NFL’s short and long run business strategies in American culture. Besides numerous sports fans within metropolitan areas and extended markets of these NFL teams, the book’s audiences are sports historians and researchers, college and public libraries and current and potential NFL franchise owners and team executives. The book may also be used as a reference or supplemental text for college and university students enrolled in such applied undergraduate and graduate courses and seminars as sports administration, sports business and sports management.

International Conference on E-Commerce and Contemporary Economic Development (ECED 2014) which will be held on June 7–8, 2014. The ECED 2014 aims to bring together researchers, educators and students from around the world in both industry and academia for sharing the state-of-art research results and applications, for exploring new areas of research and development, and for discussing emerging issues on E-commerce and Contemporary Economic Development fields. 2014 International Conference on E-commerce and Contemporary Economic Development [ECED2014], aims to bring together researchers, engineers, and students from around the world in both fields about E-commerce and Contemporary Economic Development for information sharing and cooperation. Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit their contributions to ECED2014.

This book presents recent research in intelligent and fuzzy techniques. Emerging conditions such as pandemic, wars, natural disasters and various high technologies force people for significant changes in business and social life. The adoption of digital technologies to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older digital technology with newer digital technologies through intelligent systems is the main scope of this book. It focuses on revealing the reflection of digital transformation in our business and social life under emerging conditions through intelligent and fuzzy systems. The latest intelligent and fuzzy methods and techniques on digital transformation are introduced by theory and applications. The intended readers are intelligent and fuzzy systems researchers, lecturers, M.Sc. and Ph.D. students studying digital transformation. Usage of ordinary fuzzy sets and their extensions, heuristics and metaheuristics from optimization to machine learning, from quality management to risk management makes the book an excellent source for researchers.