January 3, 1965: The 1st NBA Game on National TV

January 3, 1965: For the 1st time, a regular-season National Basketball Association game is broadcast on national television. Local stations had broadcast their local teams almost from the league's beginning in 1946, and Playoff games had been nationally broadcast.

ABC made a good choice of which game to broadcast. It was a Sunday afternoon, but after the NFL and AFL seasons had concluded. College football's season had ended 2 days earlier, on New Year's Day. Major League Baseball was out of season. So nobody would be watching any of those games.

And the NHL was pretty much an afterthought in America at this point. However, all of the League's "Original Six" teams were in action that day. The New York Rangers played the Toronto Maple Leafs to a 3-3 tie at the old Madison Square Garden. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the Chicago Stadium. And the Detroit Red Wings beat the Boston Bruins, 8-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

But this was right game to show. The visiting team was the Boston Celtics, the defending NBA Champions, who had won the last 6 straight titles, and 7 of the last 8. They had Bill Russell, the dominant NBA figure of the time. And the home team, at the Cincinnati Gardens, was the Cincinnati Royals, who featured perhaps the best all-around player in the game, Oscar Robertson. The teams had played each other in the previous season's Eastern Conference Finals, the Celtics winning, before going on to win the Finals against the San Francisco Warriors.

The teams did not disappoint. The Royals led 25-22 after the 1st quarter. But the Celtics came back, and led 52-43 at halftime, 75-67 after 3 quarters, and won it, 89-85.

The Celtics' 89 points: Sam Jones 31, Tom "Satch" Sanders 20, John "Hondo" Havlicek 14, Bill Russell 9 (he also grabbed 27 rebounds), Larry Siegfried 7, K.C. Jones 4, Willie Naulls 4, and Mel Counts played just 3 minutes without scoring.

The Royals' 85 points: Oscar Robertson led all scorers with 35 points, Adrian Smith 14, Jack Twyman 11, Jerry Lucas 7 (but with 29 rebounds, even more than Russell), Wayne Embry 7, Tom Hawkins 7, Bud Olsen 2, Tom Thacker 2, and Jay Arnette scored none in his 4 minutes on the court. Russell, Robertson and Lucas each played all 48 minutes.

Sadly, videotape was expensive, and ABC taped over the master copy of this game, so it does not survive. The teams played each other in the Playoffs again, and a copy of one of those games survives. The Celtics won again, on the way to beating the Philadelphia 76ers for the Eastern Conference (with Havlicek famously stealing the ball), and then the Los Angeles Lakers for another title.

There were 2 other games played in the NBA that day. The aforementioned Warriors lost to the Baltimore Bullets, 142-132 at the Baltimore Civic Center (now named the CFG Bank Arena). And the aforementioned Lakers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 99-92 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.