Basketball is an established game now, having been invented in 1891, by James Naismith, when he was 30 years old and looking for an indoor activity for young men during the winter.
He didn't think to cut the bottoms out of the peach baskets and he had a jump ball after every made basket (which wasn’t very often) but they got it mostly straightened out eventually.
Still, basketball, at least as it was understood by White America, was pretty dull until the game began to become integrated.
While most fans saw basketball as a relatively staid game, in black neighborhoods across the country a very different game was developing and when African-Americans began to play in college and the NBA, the game began to change dramatically.