Defunct Basketball Team Names

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional men's basketball league, currently consisting of 30 teams in North America (29 in the United States and one in Canada).

The league began in New York City in 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). It adopted the name National Basketball Association (NBA) at the start of the 1949–50 season when it absorbed the National Basketball League (NBL).

At some point we will have posted about all the NBA teams' name origins. Some of them are fairly obvious; some are not. But an interesting side note is the now defunct basketball teams and their name origins.

There have been 15 defunct NBA franchises.

One of those defunct teams and names is the Providence Steamrollers. They were a BAA team based in Providence, Rhode Island. They were one of the original eleven Basketball Association of America teams, and they posted an all-time record of 46–122 (.274) before folding after three seasons.

The Steamrollers still hold the dubious NBA record for the fewest games won in a season with six, in the 1947–48 season.

During the 1947–48 season, the Steamrollers' coach Nat Hickey activated himself as a player for one game two days before his 46th birthday, setting a still-standing record as the oldest player in NBA history.

The team took its name from the NFL franchise that was also called the Providence Steamrollers. They won the NFL championship in 1928 and are the last NFL champion to no longer be in the league. The Providence Steam Roller (also referred to as the Providence Steam Rollers, the Providence Steamroller and the Providence Steamrollers) were a football  team from 1925 to 1931. Providence was the first New England team to win an NFL championship. Most of their home games were played in the small 10,000-seat stadium that was built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The Providence team was established in 1916 by two staffers at the Providence Journal - sports-editor Charles Coppen and part-time sports-writer Pearce Johnson. During halftime of one game, Charles Coppen heard a spectator remark that the opposing Providence team was "getting steam-rolled." He liked that remark so much that he named his team the Steam Roller.

As of this writing, the Steamrollers remain the last professional sports franchise from one of the Big Four leagues to be based in Rhode Island.

One defunct team whose name has survived is the Denver Nuggets. The original Nuggets joined the NBL for the 1948–49 season, and then joined the NBA after the merger for the 1949–50 season. The Nuggets were the first major professional sports franchise in Colorado, and the first NBA franchise west of the Mississippi.

In 1950, the Nuggets were one of seven teams, including Anderson Packers, Chicago Stags, Sheboygan Red Skins, St. Louis Bombers, Washington Capitols, Waterloo Hawks, that dropped out of the National Basketball Association altogether.

When the Denver Rockets of the American Basketball Association (ABA) joined the NBA, a contest was held in 1974 to give the team a new nickname since the NBA already had the Houston Rockets. The "Nuggets" name, which referenced Colorados days of gold mining for nuggets, was selected for the new team.

The current Denver Nuggets also started out in the same venue as the original Nuggets, the Denver Auditorium Arena, playing there from 1967 to 1975. They now play their home games at Pepsi Center, which they share with the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League (NHL) and the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League (NLL).

Bing

The Bing home page varies its look with each refresh - screenshot via Wikimedia

Microsoft was developing a search engine to compete with Google and others and wanted a name that was short, memorable, and easy to spell or rather not misspell. Their previous attempts at a search engine had been called MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search.

Before settling on "Bing," they had supposedly considered "Bang.” That was rejected because if it was used as a verb (as in "Googling" something), the resulting "I Banged it" sounded inappropriately obscene.

So, they went with “Bing” which met their requirements. It also suggested the term sometimes used when someone finds something they were looking for - bingo!

I also see mentioned that when a lightbulb goes off over a cartoon character's head(a "lightbulb moment") to mean they just got a good idea, you often hear a “bing” sound effect.

In China, the Bing website is called bì yìng, which translates as “very certain to answer.” That sounds good too. Bing's detractors have erroneously suggested that it is an acronym for Bing Is Not Google.

Sports Teams Names

Besides all the jargon of sports, many names of teams have unusual origins, and many terms in sports come from names. Here are some team name origins for hockey, football and baseball.

In the National Hockey League, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks got their name from Disney CEO Michael Eisner who named the team after the hit Disney hockey movie The Mighty Ducks.

When Businessman Charles Adams wanted his new franchise to have brown and yellow team colors to match his stores, and a name equated with strength and power, he ran a contest and the winning fan entry was the Boston Bruins in the early days featuring a bear/bruin.

The Buffalo team management held a contest and chose Sabres as fitting since team officials wanted a name not being used in the pros and something other than a buffalo/bison variation.

When the Flames were located in Atlanta, the name referenced the burning of the city in the Civil War. When the team moved to Calgary, management held a contest and the fans chose to keep the Flames name. The flame could now be considered a reference to Alberta's petroleum industry.

In the National Football League, when George Halas moved his oddly-named Decatur Staleys to Chicago in 1921, the Staleys played at Wrigley Field, the home of baseball’s Cubs. Halas thought that if the baseball tenants were Cubs, then his more rugged gridiron combatants should be known as the Bears.

Paul Brown chose Bengals as the team name for Cincinnati’s 1968 AFL expansion team because there had been earlier football teams in the city called the Bengals. The oldest Bengals were members of an earlier AFL in 1937, then competed as an independent club in 1938, then played in a new AFL from 1939-41 before the AFL merged with the NFL.

The Buffalo Bills nickname refers to William F. Cody, who was known as “Buffalo Bill.” Buffalo had a football team called the Bisons, but the city’s minor league baseball and hockey teams also had the same name. The football team held a contest to select a new nickname following the 1946 season. More than 4,500 entries were submitted and Bills beat out Bullets, Nickels and Blue Devils.

           

In Major League Baseball, one team name example is the 1961 expansion version of the Washington Senators, who were obviously named for the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C.

When they moved to Arlington, Texas in 1972, they took on the totally-Texas nickname Texas Rangers, referencing the famous Texas Ranger Division, the law enforcement agency that was created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823.

The aptly named Colorado Rockies became a new franchise into the MLB in 1993. The nickname "Rockies" is, of course, a reference to the Rocky Mountains which cover much of the western half of Colorado. The name Colorado Rockies had actually already been used by a National Hockey League team from 1976-1982. When that team relocated, they became the New Jersey Devils.

            

Minor league teams had been known as the Miami Marlins for several decades, referencing the marlin, a popular sport fish of the state. There were the Miami Marlins of the International League (1956-1960) and the Miami club of the Florida State League starting in 1963, who was known as the Miami Marlins during 1963-1970 and then again in 1982-1988.

The MLB team began to play as an expansion team in the 1993 season as the Florida Marlins When the major leagues expanded to the Miami area in 1993, the old nickname was revived but called by the state name of Florida Marlins. The Marlins moved into their new ballpark, Marlins Park, in 2012 which coincided with a change in the team colors/uniforms and name to the Miami Marlins.

The Marlins are the only team to win a World Series in their first two winning seasons (1997 and 2003); in fact, they are the only team to even make the playoffs in their first two winning seasons. In those two seasons, they managed to make a surprise run to the World Series, both times as heavy underdogs. They are also the only team to never lose a postseason series.

Check out all our sports names posts.