Basketball

Basketball is a team sport in which two sides of five players try to score by shooting a ball through an elevated hoop. It is unusual among major sports for having a single documented inventor, date and place: the Canadian physical education instructor James Naismith invented the game in December 1891 at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he needed an indoor game his students could play during the winter, and he wrote the original thirteen rules that still shape the modern sport. A field goal scores two points, or three if the shooter's feet are behind the three-point arc when the ball leaves their hands, and a free throw awarded for a foul scores one point; the side scoring more points over four quarters (ten minutes each under international FIBA rules, twelve minutes each in the American NBA) wins. The five on-court positions are conventionally named point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward and center, though the roles have blurred considerably in the modern game as players are asked to handle, shoot and defend more interchangeably than the traditional names suggest.