Have you ever wondered what percentage of NCAA D1 men’s basketball players make it to the NBA by their exact height? I did, so I took a deep dive web-scraping height data on every college basketball player from over 350 D1 schools using College Basketball Reference for the pure sake of figuring out which ones made the NBA. The site guarantees data on all college players since 1993, but I wanted to make sure we included a couple of the shorty GOATs, Muggsy Bogues and Spud Webb, so I included data going back to 1985 which includes a total of 52,302 players. And just to make sure the database didn’t just cherry-pick a select few all-stars between ’85 and ’93, I ran a quick chart of my scrape (below) to plot the number of players coming out of college each year:

(note the drastic drop around 1999 I’m suspecting has something to do with that year’s NBA lockout)

The blue dot represents the year we will start with (1985) to capture Spud Webb. As shown, the database recorded over 1,000 college players in their final college season vs what looks like about 1,500 in 1993. So all in all, there is some data loss, but whatever – let’s run with it.

Here’s how things shake out for height-capable five-footers with the total number of college players at each height, along with the number and percentage that made the NBA:

All in all, since 1985, only 42 out of 4,035 college players made the NBA (1 percent). This might seem terrible, but when compared to an NBA promotion baseline of 3 percent for all D1 college players, it could be worse. The real height barrier threshold seems to occur for those 5’8 and under where you can literally count the number that made the pros on one hand. At that point, the one percent odds drops about in half. Oh well, I guess the NBA needs sweat scrubbers too.

OK, not exactly breaking news to hear five-footers have trouble making the NBA. But is taller always better? I expected as much, but as the following table of six-foot plus college players shows, there seems to be a threshold on the top end of NBA height:

(notable tall players such as Yao Ming, Manute Bol or Gheorghe Mureșan – all of whom did not attend American University – were not included in this research)

First off, you’ll notice that sample size is much more in our favor here than the five-foot table. This gives credence to the obvious trend of increasing NBA promotion percentages from 6’0 to 7’0. A noticeable decline occurs from 7’0 to 7’3 before the wheels on the tall wagon start to shake off. Out of 17 college players standing 7’4 or taller, only three made the NBA: Shawn Bradley, Tacko Fall, and Sim Bhullar. While Shawn Bradley played serviceable ball throughout his career, Tacko Fall just began his career in 2020 averaging a whopping 3.2 PPG to go along with a combined two career blocks. And don’t feel too bad if you can’t recall the Sim Bhullar era. It lasted three games in which he scored a combined total of one made basket.

The data seems to pretty clearly indicate that 7’0 is about the optimal NBA height. Sure, you don’t want a seven foot point guard, but don’t over-complicate it. There’s something about being 7’0 (give or take a couple inches) that allows all the benefits of being tall without any loss is agility or skill. This idea seems to be corroborated by the fact that out of the top-250 NBA seasonal FG% leaders in NBA history, the average height of the entire group is 6’10. And you might not have even noticed, but Mitchel Robinson broke Wilt Chamberlain’s #1 spot on that list in 2020. Robinson stands 7’0.

Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone that’s 7’0 is automatically going to be good. For every Dirk Nowitzski, there’s a Bill Wennington. And therein lies the point. Bill Wennington is the perfect control study: the perfect height with zero actual skill. Bill managed to make and stay in the league for 13 years at 7’0 while displaying the least amount of agility humanly possible. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bill Wennington, but let’s call a spade a spade. Everything about 3X NBA champion Bill Wennington’s skill-set can be encapsulated in this autographed photo of Bill doing what Bill did best: presumably getting posterized and casually in-bounding the ball.

If Bill Wennington isn’t anecdotal proof that 7’0 is the ideal NBA height, I don’t know what is. Thank goodness for Bill he played in the ’90s because in today’s NBA, bigs of this stature aren’t required to wear cement sneakers and can complete complicated technical maneuvers such as: pivoting.

What’s the lesson to be learned by all of this? Obviously, being short is bad. Being tall is important, but there does come a point of being too tall. 6’10 to 7’1 seems to be the optimal range. I’m fading anyone significantly taller than this having any sort of major impact for NBA clubs going forward. Big Tacko’s Fall hard.

-El Jefe

Analytic Note: The 52k player scrape only included players that attended one school as I used college as a joining feature to ID those making the NBA. While some data loss ensued by doing this, I’m comfortable in the sample size being accurately representative.