Basketball Player Heights

Example 1: The Minnesota Timberwolves ('99-'00)

Let's test our newly acquired knowledge of "mean", "median", and "mode" with some real-world data. Below we see the heights of the basketball players on the Minnesota Timberwolves squad.

Terrel Brandon is the shortest Timberwolve's player at 5'11" (71") while Radoslav Nesterovic stands 7'0" (84") tall. All of the other players fall between these values, but note that they are not evenly distributed. There are more tall players than short players (although even the "short" players are tall by most people's standards). Based on this knowledge of the height distribution, let's try to answer a few questions about the "mean", "median", and "mode."

Note: The applet used to create the above histogram can be obtained from the Globally Accessible Statistical Procedures (GASP) web site. It was created by R. Webster West, Dept. of Statistics, Univ. of South Carolina west@stat.sc.edu