How tall is Kevin Durant?

Kevin Durant's height: three listings, one very tall forward

Kevin Durant is listed at 210.8 cm (6′11″) on his current NBA.com profile with the Houston Rockets, and that is the figure this site uses. But for much of his career, his official height was something else, and his own statements about it have been some of the most quoted in basketball's long-running argument over how tall players really are.

The listings over time tell the story:

The headline point is that Durant was one of the rare NBA players who was listed shorter than he really was. For years teams routinely rounded heights upward, often quoting players in sneakers. Durant went the other way, and the gap between his 6′9″ listing and his true height became a running joke in the league.

Why Durant was listed at 6′9″

In December 2016, while still officially 6′9″, Durant said that he was actually 7 feet tall in shoes, and that he preferred the lower listing so that he would be classified as a small forward rather than a power forward. The comments, widely reported at the time and summarized on Wikipedia, confirmed what scouts had long suspected. NBC Sports, writing in 2019 when the NBA announced its new measurement rules, noted that Durant had measured 6′10¾″ at the 2007 pre-draft camp, despite a 6′9″ listing for most of his career.

His reasoning was about perception rather than numbers. In the NBA, a 7-foot listing comes with assumptions: that the player is a center, plays near the basket and lacks guard skills. Durant's game was the opposite. He handled the ball like a wing and shot like a guard, and a smaller listing kept the conversation on his skills rather than his size.

That changed in September 2019, when, as NBC Sports reported, the league told teams they had to certify each player's height measured with shoes off within the first week of training camp. Under that rule Durant's listing moved up, first to 6′10″ and later to the 6′11″ that NBA.com shows today. This site's data notes that he was measured at 6′10″ without shoes when the policy began, while the current profile lists 6′11″; the half-inch to inch between those figures is within the normal variation of a measurement taken at different times of day and in different years.

A growth story: from 6 feet in middle school to 6′11″

Durant's height arrived late and fast. According to the biographical summary on Wikipedia, he was about 6′0″ in middle school, 6′7″ at the start of his senior high school season, 6′9″ in college and around 6′11″ in his early NBA years. That kind of late growth spurt helped shape his game: he developed guard skills before he became very tall, which is part of why he moves and shoots so differently from most players of his size.

That progression also explains a famous feature of his build. As a young player Durant was very slender for his height, and scouts in 2007 questioned whether his frame was strong enough for the NBA. His listed weight has since risen considerably, to 234 pounds on NBA.com today, though by NBA standards he remains lean for someone nearly 7 feet tall.

How height shapes the "Easy Money Sniper"

Durant's case is the clearest modern example of how height plus guard skills creates an almost unguardable scorer. The key ingredients:

• Release point. At 6′10″ to 6′11″ with a wingspan of about 7′4″, Durant releases his jump shot higher than almost any defender can reach. Wikipedia's player profile notes that his height and wingspan let him get a clean shot off in almost any situation.
• Guard skills. Because he developed ball-handling before his growth spurt finished, he can create his own shot from the dribble, something few players of his size can do.
• Finishing. When he drives, his length makes him a strong finisher. In 2012 he converted 72.2 percent of his shots in the paint.
• Shooting efficiency. In 2012–13 he joined the 50–40–90 club, shooting at least 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from three and 90 percent from the line.

The results speak for themselves. He has won four scoring titles (2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014), the 2013–14 MVP award, two championships and two Finals MVPs with Golden State in 2017 and 2018, and four Olympic gold medals (2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024). NBA.com lists 16 All-Star selections and 12 All-NBA teams. He passed 30,000 career points during the 2024–25 season with Phoenix and sits in the top five on the all-time scoring list.

From Texas to Houston: a career timeline

At Texas, his rebounding numbers hint at how his size was used in college: 11.1 rebounds per game is a big man's number. In the NBA he moved fully to the wing, which is exactly the role his 6′9″ listing was meant to signal.

Durant's 2019 Achilles tendon injury, suffered in Game 5 of the NBA Finals against Toronto, came while he was driving past Serge Ibaka, himself listed at 209 cm on this site. He missed the entire following season before returning with Brooklyn.

Reading the numbers: why his height has a range

Durant's listings are a useful case study in why basketball heights so often disagree, even for one player. Several ordinary factors can move a measurement by an inch or more:

• Shoes. Basketball sneakers typically add about 2.5 to 4 cm. A player who is 6′10″ barefoot can honestly say he is "7 feet in shoes," which is essentially what Durant described in 2016.
• Time of day. Everyone is slightly taller in the morning, because the discs in the spine compress during the day. A difference of 1 to 2 cm between a morning and an evening measurement is normal.
• Rounding and policy. Before 2019, teams chose how to round and whether to include footwear. Durant's teams rounded down; most teams rounded up.
• Age. Early in a career, a 19-year-old may still be finishing growth. Durant's own timeline, with steady gains through college, makes it plausible that he was slightly taller at 22 than at the 2007 pre-draft camp.

Put together, the most defensible description is that Durant stands roughly 6′10″ to 6′11″ barefoot and about 7 feet in sneakers. The 6′9″ figure was always a positional statement rather than a measurement, and the shoeless rule simply made his listing match what everyone could see.

Small forward or power forward?

The position debate behind his old listing reflects how the NBA itself changed during his career. When Durant entered the league in 2007, most teams played two traditional big men, and a 7-foot listing would have pushed coaches and media to see him as one. By the late 2010s, the league had embraced "positionless" lineups in which tall players handle and shoot, and labels mattered less. Durant was one of the players who drove that shift: a near-7-footer whose primary skills were those of a wing. His career shows why the NBA's official positions and heights are best read as rough guides rather than precise descriptions of how a player is used.

Durant next to teammates and rivals

The table below compares Durant with notable teammates and opponents using heights stored on this site. Because those listings come from the shoeless era for active players but from older rosters for retired ones, small differences should be read as approximate.

A few comparisons are especially telling. Dirk Nowitzki, the other great shooting 7-footer of the 2000s and 2010s, is often compared with Durant; the two are within a few centimeters of each other, but Nowitzki was always listed as a 7-footer and played power forward, which is the label Durant was trying to avoid. LeBron James, his rival in the 2012 Finals and later an Olympic teammate, is about 5 cm shorter.

With Golden State, Durant played alongside Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, both guards, and stood about 15 to 23 cm taller than them. With the Thunder, he and Russell Westbrook were a forward-guard duo separated by about 18 cm. In Brooklyn, he played with Kyrie Irving, also 188 cm. In nearly every one of these partnerships, Durant was the tallest of the stars yet played a perimeter role.

You can recreate any of these matchups with the height difference calculator.

How Durant compares with the average American man

Durant was born on September 29, 1988, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. The closest NCD-RisC birth cohorts on this site are 1976 and 1996, both of which put the average American man at about 177 cm (5′9.7″). Durant is roughly 34 cm (more than 13 inches) taller.

The NHANES comparison is the most striking. The 95th percentile for American men aged 30 to 39 in the CDC's most recent survey is 187.1 cm, and Durant is about 24 cm above that cutoff. A height of 6′11″ is far beyond the published percentiles; it is a height that only a tiny fraction of men reach, and a large share of those who do have played basketball at some level. The average height in the United States page explains the cohort data, and the height percentile calculator shows where any height falls.

Family and personal life

Durant was raised largely by his mother, Wanda Durant. His father, Wayne Pratt, left when Durant was an infant and reentered his life when he was a teenager. He has siblings including his older brother Tony. His close relationship with his mother became widely known after his 2014 MVP speech, and her story was later dramatized in a Lifetime film. Reliable sources do not publish his family members' heights, so this page does not speculate about them.

Off the court he runs the media and investment company Thirty Five Ventures and the Boardroom media brand, and his hometown of Seat Pleasant has honored him with a Kevin Durant Day.

Summary

Kevin Durant is officially 210.8 cm (6′11″) on NBA.com today, after more than a decade of being listed at 6′9″. NBC Sports reported a 6′10¾″ measurement from the 2007 pre-draft camp, and Durant himself said in 2016 that he was 7 feet in shoes and preferred the shorter listing to avoid being labeled a power forward. His late growth spurt, from about 6′0″ in middle school to nearly 7 feet in the NBA, gave him guard skills in a big man's body, the combination behind four scoring titles, an MVP, two Finals MVPs and four Olympic golds. He stands about 34 cm taller than the average American man and about 23 cm taller than his former teammate Stephen Curry. To place him next to any player in the catalog, open the 3D height comparison tool.