Every basketball player in the replay is now drawn at their own height and arm length

2026-09-30 09:40 UTC

Until now every player in the replay was the same size: 1.98 metres tall, with the same arms. Now each one is drawn at their own height and arm length. A tall centre stands above a short guard, and a player with long arms reaches further. The numbers come from the simulation's own record of each player's body, not from the picture.

A height and a wingspan of their own

Every player's body is drawn from the league's own spreads when the player is created. Height starts from the league's middle, 1.98 m, and varies with a spread of about 9 cm, the spread measured among drafted players, pooled across positions. Arms are drawn as a ratio: fingertip to fingertip over standing height, 1.062 on average, varying by about 2 percent from player to player, so two players of the same height can still have different reaches. Wingspan and reach are then worked out from those two values rather than stored, so they can never disagree with them:

"body.stature_m": value("body.stature_m") + value("body.stature_sd_m") * z["body.stature_m"],
"arm.wingspan_ratio": value("body.wingspan_ratio") + value("body.wingspan_ratio_sd") * z["arm.wingspan_ratio"],

A player's earlier traits did not move when these were added. The new draws come after every existing one, and a test pins that every player already in the league is the same player as before.

Drawn from the body the game played

Each replay now carries every player's height and reach, taken from the same body the simulation used. The figure is scaled to that height, and its arm (elbow, wrist, fingertip) to that reach against the height. The shoulders' breadth follows the height, not the reach, so a longer arm does not make a broader chest. The poses that touch the ball are built from the player's own size too: how far out a shooter can hold the ball at the release is limited by their own arm, and a rebounder leaps only as high as their own body needs to get a hand to the ball, so a shorter player leaves the floor higher for the same rebound.

A tall blue player with the ball stands beside a red defender who is a head shorter, seen from the side at the start of the game — The league's tallest player, 2.11 m, beside a 1.89 m defender: about a head apart from five metres.

What you can see, and what you cannot yet

A height difference is easy to see from the broadcast camera. A difference in arm length is harder: a few centimetres of reach is small beside a whole body on a full court, so the site's own map of what the picture shows rates height as fairly readable and reach as poorly readable for now.