The 12 most and least consistent NBA stars of the 2023 season
And why "inconsistency" isn't always a bad thing
Today, we’re revisiting a topic I did last summer: reviewing who were the most and least consistent NBA stars in the 2022-23 regular season.
I used John Hollinger’s easily-calculable Game Score1 metric for this analysis. Game Score is an all-in-one number that summarizes a player’s box score contributions in a single game. Points/rebounds/assists/steals/blocks/made shots = good, missed shots/turnovers/fouls = bad.
Boring math: I took every NBA player’s stats from every game last season and whittled it down to the top 50 point-scorers in the NBA (points are generally the biggest driver of Game Score), min. 50 games played. I then took the standard deviations of each player’s Game Scores and normalized them by dividing the standard deviation by the player’s mean Game Score; this helps stabilize comparisons between players whose average Game Score is 15 and guys whose average Game Score is 25.
It’s important to note that the standard deviation divided by the average doesn’t mean anything tangible in and of itself, but it is useful for rank-ordering players. A lower number indicates a more consistent output; a higher one means more nightly variance.
The 12 Least Consistent NBA Stars
“Inconsistent” is a pejorative word in sports, but in the NBA, inconsistency isn’t necessarily a negative. It's often a product of a player’s function in the offense or a misleading label for players prone to massive outbursts. The way we’re measuring consistency here is largely a measure of the stability of a player’s situation as much as it is a measure of the players themselves — varying health, trades, rotation changes, etc. can all impact the opportunity a player has to make a box score impact.
The first and biggest takeaway from the list further explains what I mean. You’ll notice that this list is primarily made up of some of the lowest scorers in the top 50, many of whom are shooting guards who struggle with efficiency (hi, Jalen Green!) and/or depend heavily upon the high-variance three-pointer. Most don’t make up ground with a preponderance of other counting stats.
But this is somewhat a function of role: shooting guards traditionally are there to, well, shoot! If their primary responsibility is to launch from deep and space the floor, it only makes sense that they would be relatively inconsistent night-in and night-out since so much of their value is derived from long-distance shooting. This is not an indictment of the individual players as much as it is a product of their role in the offense.
Devin Booker and Donovan Mitchell’s presence near the bottom of the list may surprise you, and here is where I stress yet again that “inconsistency” isn’t always bad. Mitchell, for example, was a reliable scorer and playmaker for the Cavaliers. But he also had the highest single-game Game Score of any player in the NBA last year: 60.8 (the third-highest ever), in a game where he scored 71 points and had 11 assists.
That high outlier alone will impact Mitchell’s standard deviation. Booker is similarly afflicted, although not to the same degree.
Mikal Bridges is another fun name. He was a role player nonpareil in Phoenix, but the midseason Kevin Durant trade thrust him into a much bigger role in Brooklyn, where he scored a lot of points but had some up-and-down shooting nights. His inconsistency is primarily due to being thrust into a new and unfamiliar situation.
So again, inconsistency here isn’t always a bad thing! But all that said, it’s usually better to be consistently great.
The 12 Most Consistent NBA Stars
If the least inconsistent stars often fit a specific archetype, the steadiest stars don’t share much in common besides superstardom. The single most consistent player in the NBA for the 2022-23 season, however, shocked me.
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