Basketball is a sport dominated by tall people. Less than 1% of all men in the United States are 6-foot-9 or taller, but more than half of the MVP awards in NBA history have been won by players at least that height.
And yet, throughout the league’s history, there’s always been a role for the little guy—the ball handler, the table setter, whatever you want to call them. From Bob Cousy to John Stockton to Chris Paul, many of the great point guards in NBA history have been folks you might not pick out as basketball players if you walked by them on the street.
Within the past decade, though, opportunities for shorter players have significantly diminished. In the 2019-20 season, 22% of all regular season minutes went to players listed at 6-foot-3 or shorter. This past season, that share had dropped to just 16%.
Even when they are given a chance to play, smaller players are not initiating plays like they once were. Five years ago, 38% of the time that the ball was possessed, it was by a player 6-foot-3 or shorter, per NBA tracking data. In 2024-25, that was just 27% of the time.
The raw data obscures just how substantial and prolonged the downfall of the little guy in the NBA has been. Before the 2019-20 season, the NBA standardized official height listings by requiring players to be measured without sneakers, which reduced the average league height listed on NBA.com by about three-quarters of an inch from the prior year.
The share of total minutes recorded for players 6-foot-3 or shorter had been falling for a while—from 23% to 18% between 2008-09 to 2018-19—but momentarily surged up to 22% because of the change in height measurement. Since then, the decline has resumed. This is a multi-decade trend.
And for especially tiny players hoping to carve out a role, forget about it. This season, just a single player standing less than 6 feet saw the court—the Memphis Grizzlies’ Yuki Kawamura for a grand total of 83 minutes. In the 1999-00 season, 10 players listed at 5-foot-11 or shorter played significant time, collectively accounting for 3% of all NBA minutes, despite the inflated height measurements back then.
Strategic shifts on both sides of the ball have sent little guys to the bench, or in many cases, the G-League. The first is the rise of switching screens as a defensive strategy. According to Second Spectrum tracking data via FiveThirtyEight, teams switched 9% of pick-and-rolls in 2014-15 and 24% of such plays in 2021-22. Doing so prevents on-ball defenders from being left behind the play trying to fight through a screen, but the approach necessitates defenders who can guard a variety of positions to avoid mismatches after switching.
On the flip side, offenses have become more geared toward “switch hunting,” or setting screens with the specific purpose of forcing a switch and creating a mismatch. The NBA has enforced illegal screens less strictly in recent years, and it is harder for smaller players to fight their way around screeners charging at them like football linemen. When facing switch-hunting offenses, defenses now must work harder to “hide” some smaller players so they don’t end up guarding big men.
“When you’re smaller they always say you’re a defensive liability,” 5-foot-9 Isaiah Thomas said in _ESPN The Magazine_ following his 2017 All Star season. “If somebody scores on a 6-5 guy, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s good offense.’ If somebody scores on a 5-9 guy, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s a liability; he’s too small.’”
Offensively, the traditional point guard role—bringing the ball up every play and getting the action started—has nearly disappeared. Modern, more skilled big men can grab a rebound and dribble it up themselves. Additionally, with the rise of “heliocentric” offense, teams rely more on their best scorers, regardless of their height, to also handle the ball and generate plays for teammates. Forwards Jayson Tatum (6-foot-8), Paolo Banchero (6-foot-10), and Giannis Antetokounmpo (6-foot-11) all led their teams in time of possession per game this postseason.
Even among guards, the ability for a taller player to see over the defense can be an advantage when making reads. All-Stars such as Luka Dončić and Cade Cunningham come to mind, but look no further than the two primary ball-handlers in the 2025 [NBA Finals](https://www.sportico.com/t/nba-finals/): the Indiana Pacers’ 6-foot-5 Tyrese Haliburton and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s 6-foot-6 Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
This season, the Pacers had a player 6-foot-3 or shorter possess the ball 19% of the time, while that mark was just 12% for the Thunder, well below the league average of 27%. The “short kings” seeing action in the 2025 NBA Finals are Indiana’s T.J. McConnell (6-foot-1) and Oklahoma City’s Cason Wallace and Isaiah Joe (each 6-foot-3). McConnell is an energizer bunny and a master at stealing the ball from taller players, but plays less than 20 minutes per game, while Wallace and Joe have 6-foot-8 and 6-foot-7 wingspans, respectively.
For the most part, length is critical to both finalists’ defensive styles. The Thunder employed a swarming defense and used every inch of their collective reach to record 10.3 steals per game, the most by any NBA team in a season this century.
The Pacers like to pressure ball-handlers full-court, which noticeably bothered the New York Knicks’ 6-foot-1 superstar Jalen Brunson in the Eastern Conference Finals. Brunson still had a highly productive series, but he averaged 7.3 assists and 2.5 turnovers per game in the regular season, and in the conference finals that ratio worsened to 5.7 assist and 4.0 turnovers.
Three years ago, _Sportico_ wrote about the [shrinking of NBA big men](https://www.sportico.com/leagues/basketball/2022/2022-nba-finals-height-1234678581/)—the 2022 NBA Finals marked the first ever in which no starters were taller than 6-foot-9. In the 2025 NBA Playoffs prior to the Finals, no Pacers or Thunder players shorter than 6-foot-4 were on the court for a single opening tip.
That obituary for the behemoths may have been premature, as the 2025 NBA season marked a triumphant return of lineups with multiple big men, which create more second chance opportunities via offensive rebounds and simultaneously protect the paint on defense. The Thunder, for instance, typically start 7-footers Isaiah Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren together.
Perhaps a similar turnaround will occur at the other end of the spectrum. But with more and more draft prospects at all positions entering the league with a previously unheard of combination of size, quickness and skill, it may prove difficult for smaller players to keep up.