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.