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Cagers
The court was also ringed by something new to basketball — a 12-foot, chain-link "cage" separating players from fans.
"The Trentons had conceived the idea that a cage would make the game faster by stopping all out-of-bounds delays," wrote Marvin Riley, the referee at that historic game. "That cage was an object of both interest and sarcasm for a long time. It was called 'Trenton's monkey cage.'"
By the 1920s, the cage had been phased out of the game. Still, headline writers fell in love with the word as a synonym for basketball, and players are sometimes still called "cagers."
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