The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada). The NBA is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world. The league is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. The NBA was created on August 3, 1949, with the merger of the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and the National Basketball League (NBL). The league later adopted the BAA's history and considers its founding on June 6, 1946, as its own. In 1976, the NBA and the American Basketball Association (ABA) merged, adding four franchises to the NBA. The NBA's regular season runs from October to April, with each team playing 82 games. The league's playoff tournament extends into June, culminating with the NBA Finals championship series.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (Amharic: አቤል መኮንን ተስፋዬ; born February 16, 1990), known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer-songwriter and actor. His accolades include four Grammy Awards, 20 Billboard Music Awards, 22 Juno Awards, six American Music Awards, three MTV Video Music Awards, a Latin Grammy Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award. Tesfaye began releasing music anonymously in 2009. After co-founding the record label XO, he released three mixtapes—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—in 2011, and gained recognition for his blend of contemporary and alternative R&B, as well as the mystery surrounding his identity. He signed with Republic Records to reissue the mixtapes into the compilation album Trilogy (2012), and release his debut studio album, Kiss Land (2013) the following year. After a string of collaborations and film soundtrack contributions from 2013 and 2014, Tesfaye transitioned from alternative R&B to a pop sound with his second and third studio albums, Beauty Behind the Madness (2015) and Starboy (2016), both of which debuted atop the US Billboard 200, spawning the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Can't Feel My Face", "The Hills", "Starboy", and "Die for You".