How Tall Is Kevin Durant’s True Height Compared To Anthony Davis’s Height?

I’ve said this before but I used to be a huge basketball fanatic when I was younger. Practicing 5 hours a day outdoors in the summer when I was a freshman in high school, I wanted to make it to the Varsity team. I was a great shooter but the pickup games showed how slow I was athletically. However, it would turn out after one year that my lateral quickness and vertical leap just couldn’t cut it for the next level. At the time, I modeled my game based on AI. Playing in the Basketball Mecca of the world, North Carolina, the cradle of so many great basketball legends, my high school friends were divided based on which Local University they supported. You were either a baby blue or a dark navy blue, representing either Chapel Hill or Duke. Entire tables in the lunch room might be even divided based on which school you liked, even though we may never be able to get into those schools. However, engineering was the desired major at the table I sat so we had a preference for the 3rd school NC State. Eventually though, I did apply and get into Chapel Hill to major in Material Science.

So I have a background based on a love affair with basketball. Maybe that is why I am so obsessed talking about height and length all the time. In basketball, it seems like one’s height is the main way a person defines themselves. You are supposed to automatically gain self-esteem from being taller than your peers. So I wanted to write a height related post, but not about the science. (This is similar to an article I wrote very early on in the blog when I compared the height of Kevin Durant to Lebron James (Available Here) which ironically has become one of the most popular and commonly read posts I have ever written. Maybe people care more about the pictures and camera angles than the real science we are trying to bring to the discussion.) It is over a strange commonly discussed topic among the basketball community. That is over the real “true height” of what many sports commentators claim is the best player in the game right now KD Kevin Durant.

Just how tall is the current NBA superstar Kevin Durant? What is his true height? How does it compare to the other ‘big’ that is getting a lot of news these days, Anthony Davis and his height?.

Two numbers define a basketball player’s “length”, their height and wingspan. If you have also a large wingspan relative to one’s height, which is assumed to be already tall, you are described as “long”.

• KD’s Draft Express Measurements have him listed at around 6′ 9″ without shoes with a wingspan of 7′ 4.75″ (Draft Express) or 7′ 4″, depending on which resource you referenced. he has a 9′ 2″ reach.
• Anthony Davis’s Measurements are supposed to be 6′ 9.25″ without shoes with a wingspan of either 7′ 5.5″ (Draft Express) or 7′ 4″, depending on which resource you referenced. He has a 9 foot reach.

Looking at the body proportions of the two, their lengths are almost exactly the same, but their horizontal dimension, width, is so different from each other. Durant’s shoulder is rather thin compared to the rest of his body. Davis’s shoulder in comparison looks to be three times as large.

In a recent interview Anthony Davis gave to determine who would be the 2014 NBA MPV (Available Here) he listed KD at 6′ 10-6′ 11″. So it is obviously very strange that such a physical specimen like Anthony Davis would claim a fellow basketball superstar by his own estimation is taller than him, even though their official listings have Davis to be the taller one.

So is Kevin Durant really almost 7 feet tall as so many posters on Basketball Forum Threads claim to be?

I don’t think so, but I do believe that Durant, unlike most other basketball players, or maybe even men in general, have given the lower range of his height. We know that people’s height fluctuate over the entire day, as the intervertebral discs inflate and compress based on gravity loading down on them over time. The variation can be huge, as much as even 1.5 inches or 4.5 cms.

Davis, like Lebron James, does the professional basketball standard rule of listing their height  at most a partial inch above what is listed. If they are above a certain inch, their height is listed at the next inch. Anthony Davis measured at the predraft combine of being 6′ 9.25″ in height so he put him at 6′ 10″. That is fine, since a lot of players do that. If we took into account the variation of a person’s body to shrink and expand over a day, I am sure that at some point, Davis would be up to 6′ 10″. Lebron Jame’s body would also be at 6′ 8″ at some point within the day, at the maximum measured height. That is something which I have confidence in saying.

However, the fact that Kevin Durant has been estimated even by his teammates to be not 1, but 2 inches taller than his listing suggest that maybe it is more than just his desire to put his official height listing at the lower range and diurnal variations. 2 inches is too much of a different. There have been maybe a little too many people around KD who have made the off handed general comment that he seems to be noticeably taller than what he actually writes down.

1. So it is not just that he lists his height at the low range
2. Plus, it is not just that he took the lowest value from the changes in his height over the day.

That means there is another factor or element which we haven’t considered. I am going to take a guess, and say that it has to do with the profile shape of his skull.

Here is my personal theory: Different nations and cultures have different hairstyles. African American men seem to prefer to go for the short hair look. It is rare to see a black NBA player who has long hair. Most of them have a very clean cut shave. Sure, white american men do that shaved head too (I shave my head all the time too) but black men in the last 2 decades , since the 80s, seem to really go for the very short hair style.

What that results in is that we can see the shape of these black professional player’s skull very clearly. Kevin Durant’s side profile shows that the skull bone portion that is dorsal of the parietal lobe of the outer cerebrum is extremely pronounced.

In a video which KD loaded to his own YouTube Channel (Kevin Durant’s 35th Hour, Episode 2: Hard Work Beats Talent) I clipped a picture from the time range of 10:30 showing him saying hi to Carmelo Anthony. Anthony is listed to be around 6′ 8″ (with a Draft Express predraft combine listing of just 6′ 6″) and actually looks not that much shorter than KD. I am guessing that if they both stood up completely straight, took off their shoes, held to an erect torso posture, and lined their heads against the wall for a clear height measurement reading, Anthony would be not that much shorter than KD.

Personally, I would find it very hard to believe that these elite athletes, which number only a few hundred out of the entire world, with their already extraordinary size and length feel any type of insecurity in the need to inflate their listed heights. For a person of Carmelo Anthony’s athletic skill, it doesn’t make much sense for him to list himself even 2 inches taller than what he really is. The most that most people would do is maybe say that they are an inch taller than what they really are. Melo could be probably more closer to 6′ 7″ most of the day, so in comparison, KD is not that much taller.

In a very old post I wrote about, I talked about this interesting trick to increase one’s measured height by tilting one’s head for maybe upwards of 1/4 -1/2 of an inch in height increase. (Entitled “Grow Taller By Head Tilting“). Most people including basketball players are told to took forward instead of down when getting their height measured. If in fact, you tilted your head downwards by 45 degree, your measured height depending on the pronounced bulging of the parietal bone at the back of the top of the head would elevate that measured height.

Looking at the picture of Kevin Durant’s Side Profile, you see that his skull is noticeably more pronounced in the back. That is why in actually, he is probably around 1/2 -1 Full Inch Taller than even his low range of height. The way that he is measured, with his face tilted upwards (Not downwards) means that the top of his skull is not actually at the peak, which is how you are supposed to measure your height. The NBA trainers did not get the actual peak of his head, which should be from the back, and not the middle of the head for Durant. It is his own unique skull bone structure which makes him actually taller than what is claimed.

He is NOT lying. It is just that the way height has been traditionally measured did not take into account that the way you tilt and position your face relative to the back of the head parietal bone can be a big difference by as much as even as much as 0.5-.075 of an inch. For Kevin, since he was probably measured with his face looking ahead, he was measured about 3/4th of an inch shorter than what he really would be at, based on his unusual skull side profile.

There is also the issue of his slouching. Since his rather proportionally thin shoulder blades make him develop an ectomorphic body type, his upper body strength would not be as high as a person with wider shoulders. The result is that his usual posture is a slouching hunches pattern. His propensity to slouch and not have the best posture means that he probably did not completely stand fully erect for his combine measurements. Most people would try to puff up their chest and stand as erect and straight as possible to get the highest reading. He seems like the relaxed, cool guy who did not care that much for such a thing, since he is already tall, and tall enough to make a huge difference in the game that he plays at the professional level.

A good full erect posture and a normal slouched posture could make probably around a 1/2-3/4th of an inch difference.

If we combine the effect of the tilted head and his slouching feature, I would say that if he really tried to really get a maximum reading, by tilting his head downwards at the right angle and his standing as straight as possible, his real reading would be around 6′ 9.75″ – 6′ 10.5″. Averaged out, I am willing to say that Kevin Durant’s real true maximum height, if he did the best, most accurate reading, and taking into consideration changes throughout the day, would be actually at 6′ 10″.

Anthony Davis in comparison, has the extremely wide shoulders to suggest that his upper body has the bone infrastructure to hold up for a proper measurement. Davis choose to go with the traditional way of height ruling. Stand as straight as possible, feet in the proper position, puff up chest, and back leaning against the wall.

Assuming a quarter of an inch over a height listing, he put himself at the next inch which is the industry standard. Anthony Davis is probably closer to the 6′ 9.5″- 6′ 9.75″ height mark most of the time (NBA predraft measurements do indeed seem to get unusually low height measurements on average by around 1/4th of an inch) so he is just around 1/4 of an inch shorter than KD, which is almost impossible to detect from far away.

Most men measure their relative height to other men based on where they are at eye level. Of course, they are assuming that the distance from eye level to the top of the head is the same, which it is not. Based on a few personal measurements, the average distance from eye level to the top of the skull ranges from 4-5 inches. If you are looking at another person who is exactly looking at you in the eye at the same height, there is no way to tell which person is actually taller, and the difference between you and the other person can be as much as a full inch apart, based on the natural shape and form of the skull.

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To get an idea on how much I tabulate length in basketball players, this listing was something I created in my own time in an excel sheet months ago…

An Increased Oxygen Concentration Level Causes Insects To Grow In Size

I was watching the 9th episode for the new Cosmos: A Space Odyssey series when the Astronomer/Physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson explained a principle on why insects that was alive on Earth 300 Million years ago (called the Carboniferous Period) could be able to grow to incredible sizes.

The way I understood his idea was that insects are basically animals, in the animal kingdom. That means that they will need like all animals Oxygen to be able to get to all of their tissue. Flora Organisms, aka within the Plant Kingdom, need the other type Carbon Dioxide.

It turns out that insects don’t have lungs. The insects that were living back then was able to bring the O2 into their bodies through outside their bodies by some type of opening (I suspect that he means like any orifice, like a mouth) by transporting the oxygen through a network of tubes.

If the insect was too large, the outer reaches of the tubes, closest to the orifice’s opening adjacent to the opening to the outside of the body, would be absorb all that oxygen before the oxygen reaches the internal organs. Imagine your skin getting all the O2 but the O2 never reaches your heart. However, the carboniferous period’s atmosphere supposedly had twice the level of oxygen as current day.

This means that insects could grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. The result is that the dragonflies would grow to the size of eagles and the millipedes can grow to the size of alligators.

So I started to think about the consequences of what would happen to the evolution of humans if the atmosphere of Earth increased in O2 levels.

Would an increased oxygen concentration level in the earth’s atmosphere cause mammals, specifically humans to get larger in size over time too?

I have before asked the theoretical question and did some calculations to guess whether there is a limit to how large humans can get. What we could come up with were three main constraints which would limit the size of humans.

• The natural material strength of articular cartilage, the collagen in joints, and fluids like those found in the synovial joint of the knees and the nucleus pulposus. – Too much mass on top of the body would crush the tissue below it, like the IVDs would be crushed. (Remember that humans is one of the few animals which walk completely upright. Most mammals have 4 legs, not two arms and two legs. That means their entire body weight is equally distributed into quarters. We put so much emphasize on our heights because we walk on two legs and are upright aka erect! If we had 4 legs on the ground, we would not care about height, but length instead, like how one measures a fish.)
• The surface area over volume/mass ratio of a the person would decrease to a point where the mass could burst out of the person. (Remember that as a person increases vertically, their weight/mass increases at a cubic rate (^3) while the surface area increases at a squared rate (^2). This is why a person 5 feet tall can weight 100 lbs, 6 feet at 200 lbs, and at 7 feet tall at 400 lbs. With every feet we go up, our weight goes up at a faster rate than our skin (and maybe also skeletal structure) can handle)
• The corollary to the 2nd point is that the heat transfer limitations of a thick enough skin to hold all that volume/mass in the body means that the body would hold all the heat inside. The result is the internal organs turned into liquid from being heated to an insane level.

This new point that DeGrasse Tyson makes shows that we forgot at least one more critical point, which is that as a person’s body increases, the amount of length of blood vessels the blood would have to be pumped through increases dramatically. It may not seem like a lot of distance to cover but it was said that all the blood vessels in one person lined together on a straight line is supposed to reach from one coast of North America to the other coast.

I remember watching a documentary where it was revealed that current Indiana Pacer’s Center Roy Hibbert, standing at 7′ 2″ has a heart size that is twice as big as the average human. Obviously his heart has to do a much higher level of output of blood pumping to get the nutrients in the blood to all the places in his body. There is only so far a biological instrument like the heart can grow up to before the 4 chamber system can not contract and relax fast enough to pump the necessary flow of blood around the entire body.

(On a side note, primatologist have confirmed the existence of a distance relative the gigantopithecus, which is believed to be up to 10 feet tall. Assuming that the legends of the Bigfoot and Yeti is not true, but fabrications of the human mind, we still have one scientific claim that shows that theoretically, humans can reach the 10 feet mark in height.)

However, it may not just be the heart/blood/nutrient transport problem, which the increase in O2 would fix. It might also be a neuro-chemical problem, where the nerve fiber bundles are so long that the electrical signals from the dentrite-axon-threshhold electrical mechanism to just not work well enough and never reach the brain.

Remember again how Robert Wadlow died. His lower legs supposedly did not have the nerve endings working properly. I am guessing that the incredible length of his legs mean that the distance for the electrical signals from pain or stimuli to reach his brain became a constraint. When his lower leg got a small scratch, he did not feel the scratch. The result is that an infection started without him feeling anything, until he noticed it and by then it was too late.

Of course, Wadlow’s case suggest that there could be a 5th limitation placed on the human body, which is that once you get too tall/large, the nerve responses decrease since there is a much longer distance for the electrical signals to travel to reach the brain.

However, I am going to make a guess that it might be reasonable to suspect that if we increased the level of O2 in the atmosphere, the overall human race over time would increase in height at a higher rate than what is expected of it with average levels of O2. It is already guessed by some futuristic thinkers that the human race would increase in height over time anyway on average as the ability to have access to good nutrients would improve over the coming centuries. I am just saying that a O2 increase might make our whole race just slightly bigger.

At least with the increased O2 levels, the 4th major limitation would be remove which would prevent the human mammal from getting bigger.

(Something I didn’t even consider is that like insects with their exoskeletons, humans have more than just two orifices to take in oxygen. We know about our mouth and nose, which sucks in the air, which is around 20-21% O2. However, most people don’t realize that we also breathe through our skin, at around 1% of our total intake. If O2 is increased, there should be a slight increase in the rate of cellular chemical activity at least in the epidermal cells close to the outside of the body. This could stimulate an increase in proliferation of cell mitosis, specifcally chondrocytes when the organism is still growing.)

Of course, as mammals, we are warm blooded animals. Maybe O2 increased would cause biochemical reactions in our bodies which make the internal temperature increased. We would obviously need more food caloric intake to sustain a homeostatic state of temperature balance. It could have the opposite effect, and decrease the rate of human evolutionary growth if the body just became too hot internally.

Michael talked about Ischemia in the past here.  I found a study earlier that suggested that ischemia of cartilage canals may reduce height growth.  Since intense clamping transiently affects the blood vessels to the cartilage it is important to study this.

Chondro-osseous growth abnormalities after meningococcemia. A clinical and histopathological study.

“The cases of nine children who survived the acute stage of meningococcal septicemia and secondary disseminated intravascular coagulation were reviewed. All of the children had major orthopaedic problems as a result of the acute disease. Detailed histological studies were performed on specimens of bone and cartilage, obtained when these patients had either acute amputation for gangrene or subsequent revision for a chondro-osseous deformity. In the specimens that were obtained from the children who had acute gangrene, the histological changes included small-vessel thrombi[blood vessel clot], osteonecrosis, subperiosteal new-bone formation, cortical disruption, cellular disorganization in the physis, and medullary inflammation. These findings were compatible with a combination of inflammation (acute osteomyelitis) and ischemia. In the specimens that were obtained during revision of the amputation, three years or more after the initial infectious or ischemic process, the clinically relevant findings involved the epiphyses and physes. The growth plates showed variable permanent ischemic damage. Bone bridges connecting the epiphysis and metaphysis were observed in various stages of formation, including several early bridges with involvement of only the physis and metaphysis. Endosteal and cortical bone, in contrast, showed complete recovery with no evidence of permanent ischemic damage. We concluded that children who survive meningococcal septicemia are at high risk for complex orthopaedic problems, both acute and chronic. The disseminated intravascular coagulation and focal infections of the acute phase are primarily responsible for the vascular injuries to the growing chondro-osseous tissues. Ischemic changes also selectively involve the physeal circulation, but may take several years to adversely affect longitudinal and transverse growth of bone.”

Image of a growth plate clot:

Growth plate with abnormal “micro” growth plate like structure: