No NBA team has moved in years, but North America’s professional basketball league was once regularly beset by franchises uprooting and resettling. 

• The Tri-Cities Blackhawks lost half of its team name when it moved to Milwaukee in 1951, and then kept things the same just four years later when it headed down to St. Louis. More than a decade after that, the Atlanta Hawks was established in 1968.

• The Sacramento Kings are one of the oldest extant NBA franchises — only its home and team name have changed. Joining the NBA in 1948 as the Rochester Royals, the team moved to Cincinnati in 1957. After 15 years there, the team moved west to two places, becoming the Kansas City-Omaha Kings and splitting its games between those two Midwestern metropolises before focusing in on Kansas City by 1975. In 1985, the franchise made its last move, to date, to Sacramento. Often bad and on shaky financial ground, the Kings have nearly moved many other times. In 2011, the Kings nearly moved south and became the Anaheim Royals, and in 2012, the Virginia Beach Kings almost became a reality. 

• The Nets can’t seem to decide which side of the Hudson River is best. A charter member of the American Basketball Association, the New York Nets became the New Jersey Nets in 1977, shortly after the NBA absorbed the ABA. In 2012, the Nets moved back into the city, giving rise to the Brooklyn Nets. 

• After it failed to secure public funding for a new arena, the Seattle SuperSonics headed east and became the first major sports franchise in Oklahoma — the reigning NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder. 

• Only 14 years into its life, the Charlotte Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, and the NBA gave an expansion team to Charlotte in 2004. As of the 2014-2015 season, the Bobcats reclaimed the Hornets name, forcing the original Hornets to change its name to the Pelicans. 

• Only six years into its existence, the first NBA team in western Canada failed, and the Vancouver Grizzlies turned into the Memphis Grizzlies in 2001. It was a near-miss for St. Louis, which had secured a deal to move the team there, until the NHL’s St. Louis Blues owner Bill Laurie pulled out.   

• The 1970 expansion team Buffalo Braves moved all the way over to the west coast in 1978 and became the San Diego Clippers. Without league authorization, owner Donald Sterling moved the team to the more profitable and populous Los Angeles in 1984.

• The Chicago Zephyrs spent two years in the Windy City before heading to Baltimore in 1963, picking a new name, the Bullets. In 1973, they moved 50 miles away to DC and took on the name the Capital Bullets. Without moving, a year later for the 1974-75 season, they changed location names and became the Washington Bullets (later renamed the Wizards). 

• The Philadelphia 76ers have played since 1963, following a 14-year stint in upstate New York as the Syracuse Nationals. The City of Brotherly Love went a year without an NBA team, following the 1962 departure of the Philadelphia Warriors to become the San Francisco Warriors, later the Golden State Warriors when they played in neighboring Oakland. 

• Other notable moves: The Utah Jazz used to be the New Orleans Jazz, the Detroit Pistons were once the Fort Wayne Pistons, and the Los Angeles Lakers started play as the Minneapolis Lakers, although in 1960 the team nearly moved to Kansas City instead.