The seed that became modern basketball was famously planted by Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian physician, at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts 128 years ago. There were no backboards, dribbling had yet to be invented, and the three-pointer would not be universally adopted for nearly a century. Today, as the NBA prepares for its 74th season, basketball is nearly unrecognizable from the sport conceived with a peach basket and 13 simple rules. Even the name has graduated from its hyphenated form: ‘Basket-ball.’ Much of that transformation occurred in New York, where basketball moved from tiny high school gymnasiums and the city’s much-celebrated playgrounds to the sport’s so-called mecca, Madison Square Garden. (The modern MSG is actually the fourth incarnation of the arena) To illustrate that evolution, the city cataloged a series of photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries depicting everything from New York’s first intramural teams to the introduction of the backboard. The collection includes early scholastic publications marketing the sport as both good physical and team-building exercises. And while it predates many local legends, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Connie Hawkins, the catalog does offer a glimpse into New York’s early romance with what many consider…