The Most Popular Sport in the World: BASKETBALL

Most people think that football is the most popular sport, but this is not true. People watch football more than basketball on TV. However, the number of the people who regularly play basketball is higher. In China, for example, which has a population of 1.3 billion, more people play basketball than football, and it is becoming more popular. In the early 1890s, a Canadian named James Naismith invented the game. He was a PE teacher at a college in Massachusetts, the United States. James’ students couldn’t play outdoors much, because of the long winters. So, he wanted to create a game that they could play indoors. He had the idea of two teams of players trying to throw a ball into a basket above their heads.

Early basketball looked different from the game today. For example, the basket didn’t have a hole at the bottom, so every time a player threw the ball in, someone had to go up to get it out again! Another difference was dribbling, which is when a player in modern basketball bounces the ball off the floor while moving across the court. It didn’t exist in early basketball because the balls didn’t bounce well enough. One thing that remained the same is the height of the baskets: 10 feet (3.05 meters) from the ground. The biggest international TV audiences in modern basketball are for games in the National Basketball

Association (NBA) in North America. The NBA is a league of 30 teams: 29 teams from the United States and one team from Canada. The most popular teams are the Chicago Bulls, Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. Most of the players in the NBA are American, but there are also some foreign stars such as Yao Ming from China and Dirk Nowitzki from Germany.

The United States has the strongest team in international basketball competitions. In the last Olympic Games, in Rio in August 2016, the US men’s team beat Serbia 96 to 66 in the final. The US team won the third medal in a row, after it won gold at the 2012 Olympic games in London and the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing.