Where Are NBA Players From?


The maps below plot the home states and countries of NBA players for every season since 1947, by either their birthplace or their high school location.

Use the toggles at the top to adjust the season or change the set of players. Use the buttons at the bottom to switch between the US, the World, or individual cities.

Click any region for a full list of players.


Cities States Countries

Visualization by Sam Learner | | |

Code and data for this project lives here.

All NBA player data scraped from Basketball Reference. State historical population data is from FRED (Puerto Rico from worldometers). Country populations and population estimates from International Data Base (IDB) Division of the United States Census Bureau via Wikipedia. City population data from geonames. The US map projection that includes Puerto Rico came from Jake Low. US State GeoJSON from Eric Celeste, simplified to topoJSON using mapshaper. United States icon by Michael Thompson from the Noun Project, other icons from Font Awesome.

A note on per-capita numbers if "all-time" is selected: while I was able to gather historical population data for countries and states, I do not have data on the total number of people to have lived in a region over time. So, per-capita numbers with "all-time" selected reflect the number of players against the population in the selected year, not the total population to have lived there since 1946.

Last Updated: July 2020