NBA odds by height

Compare how many American men are each height with how many of them reached the NBA. At 6 feet the odds are about 1 in 68,000. At 6'10" they're about 1 in 9.

The question

Everyone knows NBA players are tall. But how much does height alone change your chances? If you're 6 feet tall, are your odds of making the league good, bad or hopeless? What if you're 6'10"?

To answer it, you need two counts for every height. How many men are that tall, and how many of them made it to the NBA. Divide the second by the first and you have the odds for that height.

Counting the men

We'll look at American men born from 1970 to 1999. Everyone in that group is at least 26 now, so most of the players among them have already shown up in the league.

According to the CDC's National Vital Statistics Reports, about 110.7 million babies were born in the United States in those 30 years. About 51.2% of births are boys, which gives about 56.7 million men. Call it 57 million.

For the players, the count comes from Basketball-Reference, which lists every NBA player with their birth date, birthplace and listed height. About 1,800 players were born in the US in those years, 1,794 to be exact.

How tall men are

The CDC also measures people. Its National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, called NHANES, measures the height of thousands of Americans in person instead of asking them. From 2009 to 2018, men aged 20 to 59 averaged about 69.4 inches, or just under 5'9½". Their heights follow a bell curve, also called a normal distribution. Most men are close to the average, and the further you get from it, the fewer men there are.

How wide the curve is gets measured by the standard deviation. For men's height it's about 3 inches. Roughly two thirds of men are within 3 inches of the average. Each extra standard deviation away from the middle gets rarer, fast.

The model here uses a bell curve centered at 69.3 inches with a standard deviation of 3 inches. NHANES measurements match that curve well up through about 6'6".

NBA players live at the far right of that curve. The 1,794 players average about 77.5 inches, about 6'5". One adjustment matters here. Before 2019, NBA heights were listed in shoes, so for players whose last season came before that change, an inch was taken off their listed height.

Doing the math at each height

To count men at a height, you take the slice of the bell curve that rounds to that height. For 6'0" (72 inches), that's everyone between 71.5 and 72.5 inches. The curve says what share of men fall in that slice, and you multiply by 57 million.

Then divide by the players listed at that height:

6'0": about 5 million men and 74 NBA players. That's about 1 in 68,000.
6'3": about 1.3 million men and 130 players. About 1 in 10,000.
6'10": about 1,000 men and 116 players.

1,045 men ÷ 116 players ≈ 1 in 9

At 6'10" you are more than 4 standard deviations above the average man. Only about 1 in 42,000 men is 6'9½" or taller. There are so few men that tall that a big share of them end up in the league.

How fast the odds climb

Put every height from 6'0" to 6'10" on one graph and the odds rise steeply. From 6'0" to 6'10", the odds get about 2.4 times better per inch on average. In other words, each extra inch above 6 feet more than doubles your chances.

That's an average over the whole range. The first few jumps are smaller, about 1.7 to 2 times per inch. From 6'3" up, each inch multiplies the odds by somewhere between about 2.4 and 3.5, because the number of men shrinks much faster than the number of players does.

Two forces are pulling in the same direction. Taller men are rarer, so each one at the top of the curve stands out. And the NBA wants tall players, so the league keeps picking from that thin slice.

What the numbers can and can't tell you

These are odds for a whole group of men at a height, not a forecast for you. Skill, training and luck matter a lot, and even at 6'10", about 8 out of 9 men never play in the NBA.

The top end is also the shakiest part of the model. The shoe adjustment moves players between heights, and the tallest heights are sensitive to it. Above 6'10", the bell curve starts to undercount how many men are actually that tall, which would make the odds look better than they are. That's why the analysis stops at 6'10". So treat 1 in 9 as a modeled estimate, not a census count.

Still, the shape is hard to argue with. At 6 feet, you're one of millions. At 6'10", you're one of about a thousand, and more than a hundred of those thousand played in the NBA.