- The Height of Success -

I must start this article with an admission. There exists within this world a subset of people who believe that height directly correlates to success when it comes to the beautiful sport of basketball. In a brief moment of outrage, I was blinded and made the now regrettable claim that shorter players score more points in the NBA than taller players. After taking the time to crunch the numbers, it appears I must put aside my pride and admit that I was wrong. The chart to the left of this text consists of points scored in the 2024-2025 NBA Regular Season broken down by height. The column highlighted in red - 78 inches - represents the players listed 6' 6", and was used as the differentiator between a "short" and "tall" player. While it may appear close in this graph, it was anything but. Players listed shorter than 6' 6" scored a total of 98,251 points this season, while players listed taller than 6' 6" scored 123,868 points - a whopping 25,617 point difference! The casual analyst may have given up at this point, content with admitting defeat and willing to live the rest of their life in shame. Fortunately, I am no casual analyst.

Determined to gain back at least some pride of basketball knowledge, I pivoted. While taller basketball players may score more points, that doesn't necessarily mean they're better or more successful. To test this theory, I turned to the overall winning percentages of teams across the league. Specifically, I sought to compare the winning percentages of teams based on where the majority of their scoring came from. Using the same dataset that was used to generate the above graph, I found that 10 teams in the league had more points come from players shorter than 6' 6" than above. Across those 10 teams, the average winning percentage was a respectable 54%, translating to a record of roughly 44-38. This leaves us with 20 teams that had more points scored by players over 6' 6", and interestingly enough those teams averaged a winning percentage of only 48%, which would translate to a record of about 39-43. Below you will find the full breakdown of point origin and winning percentages across the league:

As you can see, there appears to be at least some correlation going on between the ratio of short-to-tall points and overall team success. 3 of the 4 teams in this year's Conference Finals saw more points scored for their team by shorter players, including the 68-win Oklahoma City Thunder. While height certainly can contribute to the success of individual player success, it appears that, at least for the latest regular season, the teams that saw more scoring done by shorter players actually had more success than those who saw more scoring generated by taller players. While more research needs to be conducted to further solidify these findings, at least one thing can be certain: I was not entirely wrong. And at the end of the day, isn't that all that matters?