Oldest NBA Teams: A History of the League's Founding Franchises

The oldest NBA franchise is generally the Sacramento Kings, whose lineage runs back to the Rochester Seagrams, a semi-pro team formed in upstate New York in 1923. The Detroit Pistons (1941) and a group of 1946 franchises — the Celtics, Knicks, Warriors, Hawks, and 76ers — make up the rest of the league’s founding generation, most of which existed before the NBA adopted its current name in 1949.

What “oldest” actually measures

Franchise age is not the same as when a team joined the NBA. The measure that matters is the unbroken organizational thread — the legal and business entity that carries a team’s records, retired numbers, and history forward, regardless of city or nickname. By that standard several teams predate the modern league because they first played in an earlier circuit, the National Basketball League (NBL), before it merged with the Basketball Association of America (BAA) in 1949 to form the NBA.

That distinction is why the Kings, founded as an amateur club in 1923 and professional by 1945, outrank teams that were charter members of the BAA in 1946. City names change and franchises move, but the continuous lineage is what earns a team a place among the oldest.

The oldest franchises and their founding years

The Sacramento Kings lead the way. Basketball player Les Harrison founded the Rochester Seagrams in 1923, named for the liquor company that sponsored them; the team turned pro as the Rochester Royals in 1945 and won the NBA title in 1951 before relocating to Cincinnati, Kansas City, and finally Sacramento in 1985.

The Detroit Pistons come next, dating to 1941 as the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, a company team in the NBL. They joined the BAA in 1948 and moved to Detroit in 1957.

Three teams tie at 1946 as BAA charter survivors: the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks, both still in their original cities, and the Philadelphia Warriors, now the Golden State Warriors after moving to the Bay Area in 1962. The Atlanta Hawks also date to 1946, originating as the NBL’s Buffalo Bisons before stops in Moline, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. The Philadelphia 76ers round out the group, founded in 1946 as the Syracuse Nationals before moving to Philadelphia in 1963.

Oldest NBA franchises at a glance

Rank	Current Name	Founded	Original Identity	League of Origin
1	Sacramento Kings	1923	Rochester Seagrams / Royals	Semi-pro, later NBL
2	Detroit Pistons	1941	Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons	NBL
3	Boston Celtics	1946	Boston Celtics	BAA
3	New York Knicks	1946	New York Knickerbockers	BAA
3	Golden State Warriors	1946	Philadelphia Warriors	BAA
3	Atlanta Hawks	1946	Buffalo Bisons / Tri-Cities Blackhawks	NBL
3	Philadelphia 76ers	1946	Syracuse Nationals	NBL

How relocation complicates the record

Longevity in the NBA rarely means staying put. The Hawks moved four times before landing in Atlanta in 1968. The Warriors shuttled from Philadelphia to San Francisco to Oakland and back to San Francisco. The Kings traveled furthest of all — Rochester, Cincinnati, Kansas City, then Sacramento.

Only the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks have remained in their founding cities across their entire histories. That continuity, combined with the Celtics’ record haul of championships, is why Boston is often treated as the reference point for franchise prestige even though it is not the single oldest team. The others carry equally long lineages under new banners.

The record chase in the modern era

Franchise age is a settled record — no active team can move ahead of the Kings’ 1923 origin, and the only way the order changes is through expansion or a rare franchise folding. What stays live is the championship count that often travels alongside these old lineages. As of 2026, the Boston Celtics hold the all-time record with 18 titles, having broken a tie with the Los Angeles Lakers by defeating the Dallas Mavericks in the 2024 Finals; the Lakers sit second with 17.

For the founding generation, the milestone on the horizon is symbolic rather than statistical: the Kings approach the franchise’s centennial, and the 1946 cohort has now crossed the 75-year mark. Each season these organizations play adds to a continuous story of professional basketball that, in the Kings’ case, reaches back more than a century.

Why franchise age matters

Old franchises hold the retired numbers, the records, and the institutional memory of nearly eighty years of professional basketball — and, for the Kings, a lineage older than the league itself. Every player who has worn a Celtics or Knicks jersey since the 1940s adds to what that uniform means, and fans who have followed the same team across generations feel that continuity directly, even when the city on the front of the jersey has changed.