The 13 most and least consistent NBA stars of the 2024 season
The 13 most and least consistent NBA stars of the 2024 season
Plus, a defense of "inconsistency"
It’s that time of the offseason. We are once again looking at the most and least consistent stars of last year’s NBA 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. It is far from a perfect metric, but it is easily understandable and publicly available.
Generally speaking, Game Scores roughly correlate to point totals, so if you see someone with a Game Score of 35, you know they likely had a great game; conversely, if they had a Game Score of 5, it was horrendous by the standards of this cohort of stars. I looked at the top 50 scorers in the NBA to calculate who were the most and least consistent players on a night-to-night basis in the league last season.
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 of at least 20 mins played. I then adjusted to a per-36-minute number, took the standard deviations of each player’s adjusted 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 those 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.
Ok! The lame part is over. Let’s get to the good stuff!
The 13 Least Consistent NBA Stars of the 2024 Season
Before we begin, I’d like to mount a defense of inconsistency. Inconsistency, the way we’re framing it here, is often a product of taking a lot of three-pointers, which are naturally the most difficult shots. If your job is to space the floor and be a credible threat from beyond the arc, you are likely considered more “inconsistent” than players who shoot easier shots closer to the basket.
(Nagging injuries and/or a tendency to have the occasional explosive game can impact consistency, of course, but neither had as big an impact on the list this year as they have in the past.)
Shooting inconsistency, as we’re defining it, is not always a bad thing in the real world. It’s simply a result of the role. With that in mind, here are the 13 least consistent stars in the NBA:
Perimeter-oriented players, usually guards, always dominate the bottom of the list. Jalen Green has been near the floor all three years that I’ve done this analysis, even as I’ve tweaked and improved the methodology over time. Compared to the other stars, he doesn’t garner as many rebounds or assists, ancillary stats that can help steady Game Score, so his tendency for hot or cold shooting nights really shows up here. He looked like a totally different player at the end of the year than at the beginning, too. While that growth is a great thing for him as a player, it does contribute to his inconsistency metrics.
He’s by far the most inconsistent player of this subset, which won’t be news to Rockets fans.
These guys also tend to be the lower scorers on the list. Although I’ve normalized the minutes, players with higher outputs tend to be more stable by their very nature. If you are Luka Doncic and have an off shooting night, you’ll keep shooting. If you’re Cam Thomas building a brick house, perhaps the offense starts to drift in other directions.
Paul George and Jaylen Brown are likely the best-case versions of that player, and even they show up here, re-emphasizing my point that “inconsistent” doesn’t mean “bad.”
Karl-Anthony Towns and Jaren Jackson Jr. are fun names; although giant, both fill a similar role offensively as many of their neighbors on this list. They jack it from deep and attack off the dribble. However, I was still surprised to see Towns so low. He’s a solid rebounder with excellent shooting percentages, which usually buoy a player’s consistency rankings. Both are ultimately undone by a high level of turnovers and personal fouls compared to their relatively low points per game. The foul trouble, in particular, led to both having some subpar games. Even when you adjust for minutes, picking up early fouls impacts you in the box score in other ways: fewer blocks, less aggression on offense, etc.
Lillard is an interesting case; he has the highest average game score of all of these players by a significant margin, but he also has the third-highest standard deviation out of all 50 players (Green has the highest; the man is inconsistent in the truest sense of the word). Lillard’s first three games summarize his see-saw season: 39 points, eight rebounds, and four assists in his first match as a Buck (Game Score: 33.0), a paltry six points and six turnovers in the next game (Game Score: -1.3), and then a 25-point effort on just 14 shots (Game Score: 18.1). Lillard’s highs were high, but his lows were very low — much like the 2024 Bucks overall.