1949–50 NBA season
| 1949–50 NBA season | |
|---|---|
| League | National Basketball Association |
| Sport | Basketball |
| Number of games | 68 |
| Number of teams | 17 |
| Regular season | |
| Top scorer | George Mikan (Minneapolis) |
| Playoffs | |
| Eastern champions | Syracuse Nationals |
| Eastern runners-up | New York Knicks |
| Central champions | Minneapolis Lakers |
| Central runners-up | Fort Wayne Pistons |
| Western champions | Anderson Packers |
| Western runners-up | Indianapolis Olympians |
| Finals | |
| Champions | Minneapolis Lakers |
| Runners-up | Syracuse Nationals |
The 1949–50 NBA season was the inaugural season of the National Basketball Association, which was created in 1949 by merger of the 3-year-old BAA and 12-year-old NBL. The postseason tournament at its conclusion, the 1950 NBA Playoffs, ended with the Minneapolis Lakers winning the NBA Championship, beating the Syracuse Nationals 4 games to 2 in the NBA Finals.
Commonly 1949–50 is counted as the fourth NBA season. It recognizes the three BAA seasons (1946–47, 1947–48 and 1948–49) as part of its own history, sometimes without comment.
In this inaugural NBA season only, the ten surviving teams from BAA 1949 played a heavy schedule of games with each other and a light schedule with the seven NBL participants in the merger that created the league; and vice versa. The BAA 1949 teams were all except Syracuse in the East and all five in the Central Division; none in the West.
Syracuse played a heavy schedule of 44 games against Western Division teams: on average just over seven games each, same as they played each other (35 to 37 games against five Western rivals). The Western Division teams were generally weaker on the court; none won half of its games played outside the division. Yet Syracuse won at the same 80% rate against the East and Central (16–4) or against the West (35–9).
To define first and third place, the Lakers played one game against the Royals, the Stags one against the Pistons, preliminary to the 1950 NBA Playoffs.
The five Central Division teams and five Eastern teams beside Syracuse—that is, the ten BAA 1949 teams—uniformly played 68 games: six games in each pairing among themselves (54) and two games each against each of the Western teams and Syracuse (14).
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