I have had the opportunity to shoot Basketball in Leuven, Belgium. This gave me the opportunity to understand why this is not an easy task...
First of all, the mainly difficulty is to expose properly. The environment being stable, it is easier to work in full manual mode with a fixed focal length. You can determine the proper parameters by measuring light on a typical spot. Light is pretty uniform, allowing you to select your settings once and for all.
The limitations are: you'll need a minimum speed of 1/320 sec possibly faster to freeze the movements, otherwise your pictures will be blurred. I selected two lenses to work with, a 50mm f1.8 for overview shots and a 85mm f1.8 for "close-up" shots. Any longer lens will not allow you to get the proper shutter speed. To maintain picture quality, you'll probably want not to use any ISO value above 800 (this is on a typical camera, I am using a D200, you don't see any noise on an A3 print at ISO800 even ISO1250, some Canon camera's are even better with that respect, but even then let's say top quality means 800 ISO). If you measure the light in a pretty well lit room, you'll see that with a 85mm lens you'll need f2 to be able to shoot @ 1/320sec. This doesn't give much freedom and also shows that the high end 70-200 2.8 VR lenses (2000€ or $ category) won't allow you to shoot basketball (at least without flash or below ISO1600 which is not recommend, and then at focal distances below 100mm).
So back to the business, take a fast prime, select ISO800, speed 1/320 and f2 (depends on the light of course). If you want to do better, use a 85mm 1.4 lens or use a high end Canon camera or D2Hs from Nikon for instance to use ISO1600, this will allow to shoot at 1/500sec to give you more margin.
Anyway, this works pretty well. A last remark, since players are moving fast in all directions, the auto focus system can get seriously confused and focus on the wrong player. If you are very good and fast, you can prefocus and try to track the right player by focusing manually. I gave it a try, and as a result I have a few excellent shots but much less keepers overall than with AF. With some training, this might be the best technique (unless you can afford the best pro-camera's) - anyway photographers didn't have autofocus 25 years ago, and the pictures were good....
A few examples:
