Example sentences
tā他xǐ喜huan欢dǎ打lán篮qiú球。
He likes playing basketball.
wǒ我men们yì一qǐ起qù去dǎ打lán篮qiú球ba吧。
Let's play basketball together.
About this word
打 is the general verb for hitting, and it is also the default verb for ball games played with the hands. 篮球 splits into 篮 "basket" and 球 "ball", so the whole phrase is "play basketball". Chinese picks the verb from the body part: 打篮球, 打乒乓球, 打网球, but 踢足球. Like most 打 plus ball combinations it separates, so a duration goes in the middle: 我们打了一个小时篮球.
The story behind the character
打
扌, a hand, on the left, with 丁 on the right giving the sound. Xu Shen wrote 打, 擊也: to strike. Since then 打 has gone feral in Chinese and attached itself to almost everything. 打篮球, 打车, 打电话, 打水. You do not strike a telephone, but the character stopped caring a long time ago.
篮
籃 is 竹 (bamboo) on top with 監 underneath giving the sound. A basket is woven bamboo, so the top does the meaning work and 監, the ancestor of 监, only tells you how to say it. Simplified 篮 kept both parts and just tidied the strokes. 打篮球. Hands on bamboo, hands on a ball.
球
球 is 王, here meaning jade, plus 求 giving the sound. Xu Shen wrote 球, 玉也: a kind of fine jade. For a thousand years the character was about polished stone, until it got borrowed for balls and never gave the meaning back. 足球, 篮球, 地球. The word you shout at a game is a jade stone that got a new job.