This is a perfect bar-trivia column for an NBA Tuesday in mid June: can you name the 5 teams that no longer exist who won a championship in professional basketball? This includes the histories of the Basketball Association of America (BAA), the National Basketball Association itself (NBA), and the erstwhile American Basketball Association (ABA) of mostly 1970s fame. It’s a fun question to ponder, so go for it.

While you try to guess, remember that the BAA was the predecessor of the NBA, which absorbed the National Basketball League in the late 1940s and rebranded itself as the NBA. Then, the NBA forged ahead into the 1970s before absorbing a few teams from the fledgling ABA, which was going broke and about to collapse. It’s entertaining to trace the origins of many teams, as done with the NHL’s defunct Oakland Seals.

Okay, time’s up. Here are the 5 now-defunct teams to win a professional basketball title:

  • Baltimore Bullets (BAA): Not to be confused with the second version of the Baltimore Bullets that moved to Maryland from Chicago in the early 1960s, this original recipe won the inaugural BAA championship in 1948 and then disbanded 14 games into the 1954-1955 NBA season. Imagine that, a team just disappearing less than a month into a new season. Fact: official records for the 1954-55 season do not include the Bullets’ games and/or statistics, nor do they include the stats of opposing players and teams in games played against the Bullets. As Doc Brown said, “erased from existence!”
  • Pittsburgh Pipers/Minnesota Pipers/Pittsburgh Condors (ABA): The Pipers won the inaugural ABA crown, but they never had another winning season. The team moved to Minnesota for its second season as the defending champs, although it moved right back to Steeltown after one year in the north. The organization then changed the name of the team for the fourth season, and that did not help at all, either, as the Condors suffered their worst season ever in 1971-1972. The league itself chose to “cancel” the team at that point. Ouch!
  • Oakland Oaks/Washington Capitols/Virginia Squires (ABA): The Oaks won the second ABA title, and then they immediately moved to Washington, DC. In the sad history of Oakland professional sports, people tend to forget about this team leaving town, too. After one season as the Capitols, the franchise then settled down for the duration of the ABA’s existence as the Virginia Squires—never reaching the ABA Finals again. After winning just 30 combined games in the final 2 seasons of the league, the Squires were not chosen for admission to the NBA.
  • Anaheim Amigos/Los Angeles Stars/Utah Stars (ABA): Seriously, this team started in Anaheim. If you knew that, you should go sign up for Jeopardy! right now. The organization “moved” to Los Angeles in its second season and then finally made the postseason in its third season, reaching the ABA Finals in 1970. That wasn’t enough to keep the team in Southern California, so the franchise moved to Salt Lake City—and promptly won the ABA title in 1971, in its first season as the Utah Stars. The team returned to the ABA Finals in 1974, but it quickly fell upon hard times thereafter. The team had won almost 61 percent of its games as the Stars, but the ownership had financial issues—and the franchise also was “canceled” … 16 games into the 1975-1976 season. Again, that is just crazy, right? Poof!
  • Kentucky Colonels (ABA): This team remained in the same place with the same name for all 9 seasons of the league’s existence. The Colonels lost in the 1971 Finals to the Stars, before losing in the Finals again in 1973. Finally, the franchise broke through its only ABA title in 1975. After a 46-38 season in the final year of the league, the Kentucky organization was not picked up by the NBA due to a player dispute with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls franchise. Millionaires can be petty, after all, no? This has been the only pro sports franchise in the state of Kentucky after a failed NFL team collapsed in 1923.

There you have it; go and stump someone somewhere with this trivia question and the answer(s) as well. They will think you’re a genius, and you don’t even need to give us credit for it, as we picked it up ourselves from basketball-reference.com. Fact!