The Lowdown on NBA Players: How Many Are There?

There are 30 NBA teams

Each NBA team plays 82 regular season games, 41 each home and away. At the end of the regular season, the team with the best record in each conference is awarded a first-round bye in the playoffs. The next four best teams in each conference are seeded second through fifth based on their records. These teams play each other in the first round of the playoffs, with the second and fifth seeds playing each other, and the third and fourth seeds playing each other, in a best-of-seven series. The winners of these series advance to the next round to face the top seed in their conference, which earned that position by having had the best regular season record of any team in that conference. In this second round, as well as all subsequent rounds (the Conference Finals and The Finals), all rounds are best-of-seven series.

Each team has 15 players

As of the 2019-2020 season, each NBA team is allowed a maximum of 15 players on their roster.

So there are 450 players in the NBA

The NBA is composed of 30 teams, 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. Each team plays 82 games in the regular season. So, if we multiply 30 teams by 82 games, we get 2,460.

However, not every player on an NBA team plays in every game. The average NBA player only plays about half of the games in a given season. So if we take the 2,460 games and divide it by 2 (to account for the fact that each player only plays half the games), we get 1,230.

Finally, we need to account for the fact that there are always a few players who are injured and cannot play at all during a given season. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that there are 10 players on each team who cannot play due to injury at some point during the season. So if we take 1,230 and subtract 10 (for the injured players), we get 1,220 games played by active NBA players in a single season.

Now let’s divide that number (1,220) by 5 (the number of players on each team who are playing at any given time). This gives us 244 — meaning that, on average, 244 different players see playing time in an NBA game throughout a single season.

Now let’s multiply 244 by 30 (the number of teams in the NBA) to account for all of the different players who see playing time throughout a single season. This gives us 7,320 — meaning that there are approximately 7,320 different players who see playing time in an NBA game throughout a single season.

However, this number includes both active and inactive players — so it’s not an accurate representation of how many basketball players are actually in the NBA. To get that number, we need to subtract inactive players from our total.

According to Spotrac, there are 450 active NBA players as of October 2019. So if we take 7,320 and subtract 450, we get 6,870. Therefore, there are approximately 6, 870 basketball players currently in the NBA.