Is Average NBA Player Height Really Falling, or Did the Ruler Change?

The NBA that tipped off in 1951-52 was, by modern standards, a league of guards - the average player measured 6'4.1", shorter than most shooting guards on a roster today. Almost three inches went on over the following thirty-five years, and the reasons are unglamorous: rosters expanded, scouting reached outside the United States, and teams learned that height was the cheapest advantage available.

The Ceiling Was Biological, Not Tactical

The climb ended at 6'7.04" in 1987 and never restarted, which is the part worth explaining. Nothing about basketball strategy turned against size in 1987 - the post-up centre remained the most valuable position in the sport for another decade. What ran out was supply. There are only so many people above 6'10" on earth, and by the late 1980s the league was already recruiting most of the ones who could play. Three subsequent decades sit inside a band of about two-tenths of an inch, which is what a market at its ceiling looks like.

One number in that flat stretch does matter. The 2010s came in below the 2000s - the first decade in NBA history to be shorter than the one before it. It is a small gap, well within the precision of decade averages drawn from a single study, and on its own it would be noise. What makes it worth noticing is that the fall continued into the 2020s, and that a rule change landed in the middle of it.

Before the 2019-20 season, an NBA player's listed height was closer to a claim than a measurement. Teams supplied the figure, the figure was usually taken with basketball shoes on, and it was routinely rounded up. Nobody audited it. Players had practical reasons to shade the number in either direction - big men who wanted to be seen as mobile listed themselves shorter, guards who wanted to be seen as switchable listed themselves taller.

Certified, Barefoot, and Not Rounded Up

For 2019-20 the league required every team to certify each player's exact height within the first week of training camp, measured without shoes and reported precisely rather than rounded. Weight was left out of the exercise because it moves too much across a season. The change was aimed at accuracy in what teams reported to the public, and it worked - but it also meant that every season before it and every season after it were measuring subtly different things.

This is the discontinuity that sits underneath the shrinking-NBA claim. A basketball shoe adds real height, and removing it from thousands of listings at once moves a league average in exactly the same direction as a genuine trend toward smaller players. The two are indistinguishable in a single line on a chart, which is why the size of the effect has to be estimated rather than assumed either way.

Fifty-seven players had their official height rewritten league-wide. Thirteen have been documented individually, and the pattern in those thirteen is one-directional: twelve came down, one went up, and the average change was 1.31" shorter. Six lost a full two inches. Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, both listed at 6'7" as Warriors teammates, were re-listed at 6'5". Bradley Beal went from 6'5" to 6'3", Derrick Rose from 6'3" to 6'1".

The Big Men Came Down Too

The corrections were not confined to guards protecting a listing. Dwight Howard, listed at 6'11" for most of his career, measured 6'9". Tobias Harris dropped from 6'9" to 6'7". Joel Embiid lost the seven-foot label entirely, moving from 7'0" to 6'11", and Anthony Davis went from 6'11" to 6'10". Ben Simmons, Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving and PJ Tucker each came down an inch.

The One Player Who Went Up

Kevin Durant is the exception, and he is instructive. Listed at 6'9" for his entire career to that point, his certified height came back at 6'10" - he had been under-listing himself, by his own account to avoid being typed as a slow-footed seven-footer. His correction ran against the twelve others and slightly offset them in the league average, which is part of why the aggregate effect is smaller than the individual numbers suggest.

The question has an answerable shape. An NBA roster carries fifteen standard spots across thirty teams, so about 450 players are listed in a given season. If 57 of them were re-listed at the documented average of 1.31" shorter, the one-off effect on the league average is 57 multiplied by 1.31, divided by 450 - about 0.17".

Roughly a Quarter, Not the Whole Thing

Set that against the 0.71" total decline from the 1987 peak and the measurement change accounts for something close to a quarter of it. That is the honest answer, and it satisfies neither of the tidy versions. The league did not shrink purely because the tape measure changed, and it did not shrink purely because basketball changed. Roughly three-quarters of the fall is players; roughly one quarter is bookkeeping.

What This Estimate Assumes

Three assumptions hold that figure up, and each could move it. It treats the thirteen documented players as representative of all fifty-seven, when the documented ones are the newsworthy names and may skew toward larger corrections. It treats the count of fifty-seven as complete, when it is a media tally rather than a league statement. And it uses 450 as the roster count, ignoring two-way contracts and in-season churn. Read it as an order-of-magnitude check, not a measurement.

The single most quoted line about NBA height belongs to a 2021 reading. The study that ranks first for this question reports the average at 6'6.33" and states the league "has never been shorter over the past 39 seasons." That was accurate when it was published. It is no longer a description of the present.

Two Later Readings, Both Higher

The NBA's own opening-night roster survey put the 2024-25 average at 78.54 inches, or 6'6.54". The 2025-26 figure measures 199.9 centimetres, which converts to 6'6.70". Both sit above the 2021 low, and together they represent a recovery of 0.37" - a little over half of everything the league had lost since 1987. Measured against the peak, the modern NBA is 0.34" shorter, not the better part of an inch.

Why This Recovery Should Be Read Carefully

These three readings come from three different compilers: an independent study for 2021, the league itself for 2024-25, and a basketball statistics site for 2025-26. All three are post-2019 and therefore barefoot, which makes them broadly comparable, but they are not one consistent series. A recovery of just over a third of an inch is small enough that differences in how each compiler handles two-way players or mid-season signings could produce part of it. The direction is clear; the precise size is not.

An average can fall without the extremes moving, and that is broadly what happened here. In 2024, 72% of the league stood under 6'9" - the highest share in forty years. The middle of the distribution thickened with wings and guards while the ceiling stayed exactly where it was.

The Tall End Is Not Retreating

The 2024-25 roster survey found Zach Edey of the Memphis Grizzlies at 7'4", an inch taller than Victor Wembanyama had been as the previous season's tallest player. Six players measured 7'1", two at 7'2" and two more at 7'3". At the other end, Edey's own teammate Yuki Kawamura was listed at 5'8". A league producing a 7'4" rookie and a 5'8" guard in the same locker room is not one that has stopped valuing size.

The Three-Point Era Changed the Middle

The mechanism is positional rather than physical. Spacing the floor for three-point shooting rewards defenders who can switch across positions and stay in front of guards, and it punishes lineups built entirely around interior size. Teams did not stop drafting seven-footers; they stopped filling the rotation spots around them with the tallest available option. That shows up as a lower average and an unchanged maximum, which is precisely the pattern in the 2024-25 numbers - nine players tied at exactly 6'0", and an average weight of 215 pounds.

NBA players did get shorter after 1987. That much survives scrutiny, and anyone who says the whole thing is a measurement artefact is overcorrecting - the decade averages were already drifting down through the 2010s, before the rule change existed. The belief is not a strawman and it is not simply false.

But the Scale and the Tense Are Both Wrong

What does not survive is the scale and the tense. The entire decline is 0.71", against a rise of 2.94" on the way up - about a quarter of it, and an estimated quarter of that quarter is the league correcting listings rather than players changing. And the fall stopped five years ago. Two independent readings since 2021 are both higher, leaving the current gap to the 1987 peak at roughly a third of an inch.

What Would Settle It Properly

A clean answer needs something nobody has published: a continuous per-season series measured the same way throughout, with the 2019-20 break handled explicitly rather than averaged through. Until that exists, the honest reading is a league that grew three inches, gave back one quarter of an inch, changed its ruler partway through, and has been getting fractionally taller again since 2021.