The NBA has resumed play, with all games staged at a neutral site on the campus of Walt Disney World. But this hardly the first time that regular season or playoff games have been played at secondary sites, and here are nine notable examples where the home team was actually far from home.
1) Bay Lake, FL: New Orleans Pelicans vs. Utah Jazz (July 30, 2020)
141 days after the NBA was forced to suspend the '19-'20 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it resumed action at a neutral site "bubble." That location is the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex on the campus of Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida, a small, Disney-owned municipality located about 20 miles southwest of Orlando. Both the Jazz and Pelicans were scheduled to play on the night of March 11, but had their respective games cancelled due to COVID positive tests. For the Jazz, it was their star center, Rudy Gobert, who had contracted the virus after facetiously touching microphones and other equipment during a press conference just a couple days earlier, forcing the team to cancel its game against the Thunder. The Pelicans had their contest against the Kings cancelled that same night when a referee was revealed to have a positive test. When they returned to action, a reportedly humbled Gobert finished with 12 points and 14 rebounds as Utah was victorious, 106-104, in front of a mostly empty arena. It was the first of 88 "seeding" games that will close out the '19-'20 regular season, with home court advantage only simulated for teams, via virtual fans, personalized sound effects and music, and court elements.
2) Miami, FL: Fort Wayne Pistons vs. Baltimore Bullets (January 12, 1954)
Long before the state became the epicenter of the NBA with the 2020 bubble or before receiving its first NBA franchise in 1988 with the Miami Heat, Florida hosted its first NBA game way back in 1954. You may instinctually assume this was an early attempt by the league to expand its fanbase down south, but the reasoning was more self-indulgence than ambition. The Pistons had received their name because their original owner, Fred Zollner, had made his fortune manufacturing pistons at a foundry in Fort Wayne, Indiana. By the mid '50s, he and his wife were wintering at their second home just outside Miami but the magnate missed managing his basketball franchise in those winter months. Rather than remain in Fort Wayne, or commute back and forth, Zollner instead decided to start scheduling neutral site games in Florida. The first one happened in January of 1954 in Coral Gables, at the home arena of the University of Miami. They easily defeated the lowly Baltimore Bullets that night but would struggle overall in Florida, losing six of the nine games they played there over the next few seasons, despite being consistently one of the best teams in the league.
3) St. Paul, MN: Minneapolis Lakers vs. Washington Capitols (April 13, 1949)
4) Indianapolis, IN: Fort Wayne Pistons vs. Syracuse Nationals (April 3, 1955)
Up until the early '80s, when league popularity exploded thanks to the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird rivalry, NBA teams scheduled neutral site regular season games with some regularity. This was often the result of financially struggling franchises looking to expand their fan bases to other locales, but also happened with some recurrence just because a team's arena was unavailable for other events. In two notable cases, that home stadium lack of vacancy extended to the NBA Finals. The Lakers were based in Minneapolis from 1948 to 1960 and even though they won five titles in that span, they were almost constantly in economic dire straits. The ownership group would regularly schedule games across Minnesota to attempt to drum up state-wide interest, and eventually expanded to places like North Dakota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and California, in an anticipatory preview of their eventual move. When they reached the NBA Finals in 1949, in their first year in the NBA, the Lakers' home arena, the Minneapolis Auditorium, was already booked for a sportsman expo. Thus, the first title in Lakers franchise history was clinched not in Minneapolis but in the twin city of St. Paul, where they hosted game six against the Washington Capitols and won, 77-56, to take the championship. The same scheduling conflict affected the Lakers in Finals appearances in 1950, 1952, and 1959, before they finally moved to Los Angeles in 1960. A neutral site title series game also happened in 1955, when the Pistons, then based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, made their first Finals appearance. Because the team had missed the playoffs altogether in '53-'54, their home arena, the War Memorial Coliseum, was booked for all of April in 1955 for a bowling tournament. When the Pistons reached not just the postseason but the NBA Finals, their home games against the Syracuse Nationals had to be staged 120 miles away in Indianapolis. Though this was no doubt a hassle, it didn't seem to affect the outcome, as the Pistons won all three games they played in Indianapolis, though they lost all four games in Syracuse to drop the series.
5) Tokyo, Japan: Phoenix Suns vs. Utah Jazz (November 2, 1990)
While the early days of NBA neutral site games was a necessity, the practice was revived again as a choice. In an attempt to expand the international reach of the league, the NBA kicked off its "Global Games" series with several exhibition games in Israel in 1978. It would eventually expand preseason and exhibition match-ups to Russia, Italy, Spain, Bahamas, China, Mexico, Philippines, Germany, Dominican Republic, Turkey, France, Gret Britain, and Brazil. The first NBA game played at a neutral international site that actually counted in the regular season standings happened in Tokyo in 1990. Two years before becoming international superstars as part of the U.S. Olympic Dream Team, Karl Malone and John Stockton traveled to Japan with the Jazz to take on the Suns in two games. The Suns won the opener while Utah was victorious the next day, with the teams subsequently returning to the states to resume the '90-'91 season. Opening the NBA season in Tokyo became a regular tradition from there, and the league soon after expanded to regular season games in Mexico City, London, and Paris.
6) Las Vegas, NV: Los Angeles Lakers vs. San Francisco Warriors (November 20, 1965)
7) Las Vegas, NV: Utah Jazz vs. Los Angeles Lakers (April 5, 1984)
8) Las Vegas, NV: Los Angeles Lakers vs. Portland Trail Blazers (May 3, 1992)
The Lakers have ventured 250 miles northeast to Las Vegas for a regular season game on three occasions in franchise history, and all three had major historical connotations. The first happened in 1965 and it was the first, and until 1983 only, NBA game played in Las Vegas. Jerry West scored 34 points on that November night to lead Los Angeles past the Warriors, but the significant fact about this game is that legendary announcer Chick Hearn wasn't there to call it. He had been in Arkansas that afternoon working a college football broadcast and his private jet charter to Vegas had to be cancelled due to inclement weather. Hearn swore he'd never miss another Lakers broadcast and sure enough from that day forward called 3,388 consecutive Lakers games before taking a night off in 2001 following heart surgery. Nearly two decades later, the Lakers returned to Sin City to take on the Jazz, who hosted 11 games at the Thomas & Mack Center during the '83-'84 season. Los Angeles won the game, 129-115, but the big story was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scoring 22 points, which put him over the top in surpassing Wilt Chamberlain as the all-time NBA scoring leader. The record-breaking basket was appropriately enough his signature skyhook, and the game was paused for several minutes as Abdul-Jabbar celebrated with teammates and received a standing ovation from the neutral site crowd. In the third and final Las Vegas appearance by the Lakers, it was an unplanned diversion. When the Los Angeles riots broke out in the spring of 1992 following the Rodney King incident, the city went into curfew, leaving the Great Western Forum unavailable. The Lakers were thus forced to postpone and move game four of their first round series against the Blazers to Las Vegas, where they were blown out, 102-76. It was an inglorious end to a disappointing '91-'92 season, which had started with Magic Johnson's shocking retirement announcement. Vegas has long since been a rumored landing spot for either a relocating or expansion NBA franchise (it was also reportedly in the running as the 2020 "bubble" site) but has settled for hosting the yearly summer league and the 2007 All-Star Game.
9) Hershey, PA: Philadelphia Warriors vs. New York Knicks (March 2, 1962)
Perhaps the most striking thing about Wilt Chamberlain's 100 point game is not any of the stats involved, but the fact that no video and hardly any pictures exist of it. A large reason for that is the game taking place not on the Warriors' home court at the Philadelphia Civic Center, but instead 100 miles west at the Hershey Sports Arena, which was typically used for minor league hockey. Even though Philadelphia was the third-largest city in the U.S. at the time and the Warriors were one of the league's best teams in its first 15 years, winning championships in 1947 and 1956, owner Eddie Gottlieb was supposedly losing money due to lack of fan interest. In an effort to boost ticket sales, they would annually play multiple "home" games every season outside the city, making it as far as Boston, Buffalo, and even once out in Toledo. Hershey was the most common secondary home for the Warriors, as it was also the host site of their yearly training camp (despite player protestations about the overwhelming smell of chocolate). In their final neutral site game of the '61-'62 season, Chamberlain, nursing a hangover from being out all night before in New York, put on the ultimate individual display of dominance, dropping 100 points on the Knicks in a 169-147 win. Only 4,124 people were on hand to witness it but Hershey went down as the site of one of the most iconic games in basketball history. After the Warriors finished the season with a Conference Finals loss to the Celtics, Gottlieb sold the franchise to Franklin Meuli, who immediately relocated them to San Francisco.