The style of NBA basketball has changed dramatically over the past five years as virtually every team in the NBA shoots a lot higher percentage of three-pointers per game and other than the teams with incredibly skilled traditional big men like DeMarcus Cousins, Anthony Davis and Kristaps Porzingis who can do it all, most teams have opted for “small ball” much of the game to keep up with the game’s faster pace.
Call it the Warriors affect or maybe more aptly, the Mike D’Antoni affect.
Because of this and a few others reasons outlined in Tom Haberstroh’s fantastic piece on Bleacher Report on Wednesday, NBA players are getting much skinnier as a whole according to the Harvard Analytics Sports Collective study referenced in Haberstroh’s story:
“While both the height and weight of the league increased drastically from 1952 (the first year with minutes data) to 2000, the pattern in the 2000s is strikingly different. The weight of the league rose 7 pounds (per player) from 2000 to 2013, before dropping nearly 3 pounds steadily over the course of the next 4 years. Meanwhile, the weighted average height has stayed between 78.8 and 79.1 inches (about 6’7”), for the entirety of the 21 century….
This may seem like an incredibly obvious result, but it highlights another efficiency that NBA teams have gravitated toward in the past 5 years. Teams are slimming down, and using their athletic advantages to run the heavier teams of the floor. The NBA is again trending lighter, and it will be interesting to watch how this stabilizes over the next 5-10 years.”
There are a few more reasons for this shift, one of which Haberstroh’s references in detail with player examples, which is NBA players changing their diets and cutting out red meat or any meat or dairy products in general.
Kyrie Irving, Damian Lillard, Javale McGee, Enes Kanter, Al Jefferson, Wilson Chandler and Jahlil Okafor have all changed to a vegan or vegetarian diet in the past year.
Removing meat and diary from their diet has enabled them to drop extra weight, body fat and has given them more energy and vitality.
The other major influencer on the current style of basketball in the NBA and the resulting thinning of players which isn’t referenced in the article and may be the whole grandfather to this era is the affect of the more ball-movement heavy, free-flowing European basketball game in which big men have always been encouraged to handle and pass the ball and step out and hit the deep ball.
This style of play really started embedding itself into the NBA in the late 1990s as more European players caught the eyes of NBA scouts like Dirk Nowitzki as basketball became extremely popular throughout Europe after the legendary 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and the original Dream Team.
Haberstroh’s piece shares a number of stories about players changing their eating habits and numbers showing veganism increasing across the U.S.
As technology, medicine and physiology advances, teams and players will continue to be at the cutting edge to maintain peak performance for longer. More vitality, decreased health risks and less harm to the environment… a plant-based diet seems like a pretty good idea to me.
