How the average NBA player has evolved throughout 75 years of league history.
The NBA is celebrating its 75th anniversary season and 4,000-plus players, and it is dramatically different from the debut of the Basketball Association of America in 1946, before it merged with the National Basketball League to form the NBA three years later.
Throughout NBA history, the league’s demographics have evolved, roster and franchise numbers have expanded and a growing pool of international talent — including the three front-runners for this season’s MVP — has continued to push the league to new heights.
As the league has changed, so have its players. For example, the median BAA player (the midpoint if everyone was lined up from tallest to shortest) in 1946-47 was listed at 6-foot-2. Today, just 14% of the league’s players are listed 6-foot-2 or shorter.
Let’s chart the evolution of the typical NBA player in terms of height, weight and age, as well as the increase in international players, to see what it can reveal about the league’s past, present and future.
Number of players
The NBA consisted of an early high of 17 teams in 1949-50, the year after the BAA and NBL merged. (Although the NBL was integrated, 1950 was also the first year in the NBA’s history to include Black players — three years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. As of 2020-21, 73% of the league’s players identified themselves as Black or African-American.)
The league went down to a core of eight teams from 1955-56 through 1960-61, during which fewer than 100 players saw action each season.
Since the expansion boom in the late 1960s, the number of players to see game action has steadily trended upward. After a brief downturn in the late 2000s, the number climbed rapidly with rosters first expanding to 15 total in 2005 (replacing the former injured list and 12 active players) and more recently to 17 with the addition of two-way players in 2017.
That culminated this year, when hardship contracts during COVID-19 expanded rosters into the 20s. As a result, when Phoenix Suns rookie Gabriel Lundberg made his debut Sunday, he was the NBA’s 600th player this season — a record that might stand for a while.
It’s fitting that the league’s 600th player was also its first from Denmark. Remarkable growth in basketball’s popularity outside the United States, a focus beginning during David Stern’s 30-year tenure as commissioner, has helped produce more NBA talent.
A handful of Canadians (including Hank Biasatti, born in Italy before moving to Canada) were part of the BAA’s first season. Some players born abroad but raised in the U.S. would play in future decades, but it wasn’t until Hakeem Olajuwon (Lagos, Nigeria) that a player raised outside North America would make an impact in the NBA.
Since then and jump-started by the ability of NBA players to participate in FIBA competition starting with the 1992 Olympics and the Dream Team, the number of international players has skyrocketed. By 2014-15, more than 20% of all minutes were played by players raised outside the United States, meaning the average five-man NBA lineup now includes an international player.
Median player size and age
Let’s start with the characteristic that most distinguishes professional basketball players from the rest of the population: height. The average height of an American adult male is about 5-foot-9; Isaiah Thomas, a Charlotte Hornets guard, is the league’s only player this season who is listed at 5-foot-9 or shorter.
As soon as what we now know as the NBA came into existence, rosters began getting taller as bigger players replaced smaller ones. The huge leap in weighted height (weighted by points through 1950-51 and minutes thereafter) in 1959-60 is thanks to the arrival of 7-foot-1 Wilt Chamberlain, who logged a league-high 3,338 minutes that season with the Philadelphia Warriors.
The NBA peaked in weighted height at 6-foot-7.3 in 1986-87 and hovered around 6-foot-7 for the next three-plus decades until the league started listing more accurate heights in 2019-20. Since then, the weighted height has dipped to around 6-foot-6.
One other interesting note is the difference between weighted and median height. When the weighted average is higher than the median, as it was in the league’s first two decades, that means the players on the court are typically taller than those on the bench. That flipped through much of the post-ABA merger period as teams preferred to fill the end of their benches with size to deal with dominant post players. It’s flipped back throughout the past three seasons, suggesting teams are now worried about having enough perimeter players.
Players also began getting heavier as they got taller before trending downward in the 1970s. The average weight by minutes played peaked at 222.7 pounds in 2010-11 (with a median weight of 225) before again trending downward with an emphasis on quickness and shooting over size and strength in the modern NBA.
Lastly, let’s consider the median and weighted average age of the league’s players (as of April 15, about the typical start of the playoffs).
Because professional basketball wasn’t lucrative enough for long careers and young talent was rapidly displacing older veterans, the NBA started out as a relatively young league. The lowest weighted age on record (26.36) came in 1951-52, despite the fact that early entry wasn’t even a glimmer of an idea at that point.
Because teams tend to fill out their rosters with developing young players, the weighted age is always substantially higher than the median across all players to see action. Both trended sharply upward in the 1990s, as higher salaries made playing deep into one’s 30s more lucrative, and improved fitness and nutrition allowed players to excel longer. During the post-lockout 1998-99 season, when 35-year-old Karl Malone won MVP, the league’s weighted average age was 28.6 and the median age nearly 28.
As early entrants became increasingly commonplace, the league’s age drifted back toward where it had been much of the previous three decades. The past three years have brought another steep drop-off, particularly to the median age, because only players in their first four NBA seasons are eligible for two-way contracts.
Most median players over time
Which players have best represented the league as a whole at any given point in time? You can think of this question as more or less which player would be the best opening guess if the popular POELTL NBA player-guessing game had existed throughout NBA history. (It’s unclear what it would be called since an NBA player whose name rhymes with “Wordle” was still seven decades away.)
As a result, we’ll focus on three criteria for POELTL: height, age and jersey number (via Basketball-Reference.com’s exhaustive database) and find the player who most closely matched the median for those figures in any given season. This doesn’t always yield the best first answer — Ahmed Cheema delivered a more rigorous analysis of current opening guesses — but it matches up reasonably well.
Limiting to players who scored at least 500 points in a season prior to the NBA merger and played 1,000 minutes thereafter, here’s the list, which features the player atop our rankings of the league’s top 75 players (Michael Jordan) as well as Oscar Robertson but also a lot of players whose production was, well, fairly average.
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