The NBA is predominantly comprised of Black players — that’s a fact, but even though it’s very apparent, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information breaking down the exact numbers from year to year. Race can obviously be a very sensitive topic — especially in today’s climate.

With the NBA recently announcing that they planned on restarting the season, their well-laid out plans were announced as civil unrest and protests around the world exploded. It comes as no surprise that a few NBA players have spoken out publicly against starting the league up that would distract from the powerful Black Lives Matter movement. Their point is that the non-Black world is finally laser-focused on racial inequality and the social injustice that the Black community has faced over generations.

With that in mind, we’re going to try to approximate the percentage of Black players in the NBA.

Methodology: What percentage of the NBA is Black?

The curious question of the NBA’s racial break down isn’t uncommon.

Most often it’s centering around Black players as they’re the obvious majority. Much less often are people searching for the approximate percentage of white players in NBA. Sometimes those questions are asked for more problematic reasons that enforces stereotypes — other times they’re just curious.

To figure out the answer to that question, we first had to find out how many NBA players are in the league at any given time. From that, we would have to research each individual’s background to determine not just their race, but their nationality and where they were born.

We’d obviously like to be as accurate as possible, but because of the complexities of race sometimes it wasn’t always easy to check off one of the boxes. In those couple dozen of cases and for the purpose of this exercise, we used the eye test. This might seem like oversimplification, but as unfortunate as this reality is, the fact of the matter is if you look even remotely Black in the United States, you are considered (and treated as) so.

That’s obviously to say that this wasn’t scientific even if our intent was to be as accurate as possible. That said, the percentages we came out to should be viewed as approximations — give or take a couple percentage points.

How Many Black Players Are in the NBA?

Scraping NBA.com’s player page on June 15, 2020, there was a total of 497 players that were on an NBA roster at some point in the 2019-20 season. We took that list and analyzed each NBA player’s birthplace, race and nationality. From there, we simply added up the different categories and divided it by 497 and this is what our numbers looked like.

The answer to the number of Black players in the NBA is, including mixed race and biracial players with a Black parent, were 403. Those 403 Black players accounted for 81.1% of all players in the 2019-20 season. The NBA had 89 white players (including players from Europe, etc.) during this season; making up 17.9% of all NBA players.

This percentage of Black players has increased by 6.7% since 2015 when the Racial and Gender Report Card was released by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

In that report, the league was just under 3/4th Black at 74.4% of the league. This was followed by white players at 23.3% and the final 2% was made up of Latino/Hispanic players of any race and Asian players.

In our research, we also identified 62 players that were biracial or multiracial – that comprised 12.5% of the league. We think our numbers on multiracial players in the NBA is the first of it’s kind. In fact, we’d put money on it at https://mybettingsites.co.uk/ as we’ve researched in attempting to identify any data on biracial players. Not even the Racial and Gender Report Card says anything about multiracial or biracial players, coaches, staff or personnel.

Every NBA Player from 2019-20

As of June 15th, 2020, here’s the full list of all the players, their race and birth country. As we mentioned above, our research was strictly identifying players from online research as best as we could, so please let us know if we incorrectly identified a player as Black, mixed race, or otherwise.

The countries that had the most players represented in the NBA could have put together their own NBA teams. Canada’s profile has been growing as a basketball hotbed. In the 2019-20 season, there were 14 Canadians on NBA rosters while France boasted 12 NBA players. Rounding out the top six countries in this respect were Serbia (8), Australia and Spain (6), then Croatia and Nigeria were tied with five players each.

If you’ve come across any problems in our list or have questions about the methodology, please put them in the comments. We’ll do our best to update this list on an ongoing basis.