How many players have played in the NBA?

The NBA was founded as the “Basketball Association of America (BAA)” back in June 1946, before getting its current name around three years later in August 1949. Since then, literally thousands of players have played in the NBA with the league being widely recognized as the best in the world.

Generally, the NBA’s regular season runs from October to April while the playoffs run until June. However, recent events related to the Coronavirus pandemic has resulted in the start-date of the NBA 2020-21 season, which is the 75th in the League’s history, being 22nd December. In this article, we look at the total number of players that have till now played in the NBA.

LeBron James has led his team in total points and assists in each of his 15 seasons. No other player in NBA history has such a streak longer than 10 seasons.
— Justin Kubatko (@jkubatko) April 10, 2018

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Total number of players to have played in the NBA

Considering the 75 years of NBA’s existence and changing team rules and roster sizes over the years, coming up with an accurate number is harder than it looks like. According to Stathead Basketball, a total of 4374 NBA players have played at least a single NBA match in the tournament’s history.

Vince Carter has played with or against nearly 40% of all players in the HISTORY of the NBA.A total of 4,509 players have played in the NBA. In his 22 seasons in the league, Vince has been teammates with or played against 1,672 (37.081%) of those players.(h/t u/babyyodavan) pic.twitter.com/MYrODcPNZL
— Basketball Forever (@Bballforeverfb) May 25, 2020

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How many NBA Players have won a Championship?

However, a Reddit user had recently embarked on a quest to find out exactly what percentage of NBA players had won a Championship in League history. That answer obviously required knowing exactly how many players have featured in the NBA. The Reddit user ended up finding out that there are actually a total of 4509 players who have until now featured on aa NBA roster.

Moreover, with the 2020 NBA draft adding a pool of 60 new players who will all be expecting to get their debut in the upcoming 2020-21 season, the overall number of 4374 players who have played an NBA game should jump to around 4434 players. Finally, according to the Reddit user’s calculations, a total of 512 players had won at least one NBA ring through the league’s history.