1947 BAA draft

The 1947 BAA draft was the first ever draft of the Basketball Association of America (BAA), which later merged with the National Basketball League (NBL) to become the National Basketball Association (NBA). The fledgling BAA held this draft as a joint draft with the established NBL. The BAA first discussed the idea of creating a draft system similar to the NFL draft (which was first implemented back in 1936) back on January 1947 during league meetings held in New York, with each team being given territorial pick rights to one player each year from schools in a 50 mile radius. However, both leagues wanted to control salaries by stamping out competitive bidding between the two leagues from college players that may or may not have been returning home from World War II by assigning exclusive rights to the team selecting a player. Before the BAA's draft began, the NBL had already signed eleven players that had already graduated from college, all of whom the NBL did not feel like they should be exposed to the BAA's draft system on display. The players in question included college stars Jack Smiley and Ralph Hamilton going to the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons works team, Harry Boykoff going to the Toledo Jeeps, and John Hargis, Frank Brian, and Charlie Black going to the Anderson Duffey Packers works team. As a trade-off, the BAA teams were allowed to select players early on before the NBL did. Including the NBL's draft side of things (which saw at least ten teams of their own participate in the event themselves), the overall draft program would have included 100 players (mainly college seniors) drafted between the two leagues.

The draft was held on June 2, 1947, months before the 1947–48 season began. During this draft, the nine remaining BAA teams (both the Cleveland Rebels and Detroit Falcons decided to decline their entries into the draft while still remaining as existing franchises at the time) along with the Baltimore Bullets, who joined the BAA from the American Basketball League after a dispute they had during the ABL playoffs with that league, took turns selecting amateur U.S. college basketball players. In the first round of the draft, the teams selected in reverse order of their win–loss record in the previous season, while the Bullets were assigned the tenth pick, the last pick of the first round, due in part to their overwhelming 31–3 record they had in the ABL beating out even the 49–11 record held by the Washington Capitols. Both the Pittsburgh Ironmen and Toronto Huskies participated in this draft, but they folded before the season opened alongside the Cleveland Rebels and Detroit Falcons.