Data set on mortality of national basketball association (NBA) players

In this work, we present a data set on the survival times and mortality rates of all 4374 professional basketball players who participated in the National Basketball Association (NBA) from its inception in 1946 until July 2019 [1]. It contains the data of 412 active and 3962 former players. The data were recorded from different internet sources and include information on each player's position, ethnicity, handedness, ages at NBA debut and career end, height, weight, or number of NBA games. The results of the analysis of a previous data set with the same variables of all NBA players from 1946 to 2015 were recently published by Martinez et al. in 2019 [2]. The information provided in the data set can be useful to better understand the mortality risk among NBA players.