The team was first founded in 1931 by the local
Young Men's Hebrew Association (hence the team shortening its name to the Pittsburgh Y.M.H.A.) as a way for the local
Jews to compete against both
YMCA and other amateur teams while remaining in shape. In due time, however, they ended up becoming a
barnstorming team that toured throughout the northeastern parts of the United States of America, which spoke toward the strong presence the Jewish community had upon the sport of basketball at the time. This presence later led to the Pittsburgh Y.M.H.A. team becoming one of the eight (later nine) inaugural teams to create the Midwest Basketball Conference in 1935. During the
1935–36 season, Pittsburgh would have the second-best record in the Eastern Division with a 10–7 record (one game behind the
Akron Firestone Non-Skids), which led to them qualifying for the MBC's inaugural playoffs, which was a round robin tournament of sorts between the four teams that qualified for the playoffs that season. Unfortunately for the Y.M.H.A. squad, they would not only lose to the
Indianapolis Kautskys 46–18, but also lose their consolation third place match to Akron with a 33–29, all on March 22, 1936. That would later turn out to be the highlight of their professional history, as the following season after that, the Y.M.H.A. squad finished with a league-worst 2–9 record. By 1937, not only would the MBC rebrand itself into the
National Basketball League to have better coverage within the U.S.A., but the Pittsburgh franchise would rebrand themselves to the Pirates both as a homage to the
Major League Baseball team of
the same name and as a way to help expand their roster coverage to utilize more creeds and races beyond just white Jewish people in the future. Once the MBC transitioned itself into the NBL, the team never played in the playoffs in their three seasons within the NBL. From inception and through its first 2 seasons the team was named the "Pirates" until the franchise was inactivated from the summer of 1939 until the summer of 1944, reappearing as the
Pittsburgh Raiders for a final season in 1944–45. Despite them leaving the NBL, the Raiders would still participate in the
1946 World Professional Basketball Tournament as an independent team, with the NBL even being interested in bringing back the Pittsburgh franchise for the 1946–47 season at one point in time before a new team in
Toledo, Ohio (though some sports historians believe that it was actually the same Toledo NBL franchise that first came on board from before/during the
World War II era in the Toledo White Huts/Jim White Chevrolets, just being run by completely different ownership instead) called the
Toledo Jeeps essentially bought out the NBL spot that would have been for the Raiders, which subsequently ended any future attempts for the NBL to return to the city of
Pittsburgh (especially since the
Pittsburgh Ironmen of the
Basketball Association of America would hold a professional basketball spot there in a newfound, rivaling league that season). Even with that in mind, the Raiders would still exist as a franchise until 1950, with later years for them as a franchise having them exist in a minor basketball league of sorts called the AAL for a few seasons before disbanding for good due to how great the competitive scale had grown with the (at the time) newly-formed
National Basketball Association taking shape as a professional basketball league. ==Year-by-year==