The 14 most and least consistent NBA stars of the 2025 season
And why inconsistency is sometimes a feature, not a bug
For the fourth year in a row, I’m tabulating the NBA’s most and least consistent stars!
There are many ways you could define consistency. For ease of comprehension, I leaned on John Hollinger’s old Game Score metric1 for this analysis. Game Score is a game-level, all-in-one metric that tabulates a player’s box score contributions. It roughly scales with point totals, so Game Scores of 30+ are great and Game Scores of <10 are terrible (by the standards of this cohort, anyway).
I limited the population just to the league’s top 50 scorers, since points are the primary driver of Game Score. Feel free to skip the following italicized paragraph if you don’t care for the nitty-gritty methodology.
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, min. 41 games played. I excluded games of <20 mins played to remove injury-truncated performances. I then adjusted Game Scores 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 per 36; 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.
Now, let’s look at the league’s least consistent stars!
The 14 least consistent NBA stars of the 2024 season
As I did last summer, I want to caution against using inconsistency as a pejorative, at least as we’re framing it here. The bottom of my consistency rankings is riddled with players who rely heavily upon the three-pointer, which is a lower-percentage shot. Perimeter-oriented players have a vital role in a functioning NBA offense, even on off nights; do defenses leave Steph Curry open to double-team Draymond Green even when Curry is 2-for-11 from deep? Of course not. Game Score is a box score metric, so it can’t account for on/off data or anything more complex. Therefore, floor spacers are unfairly penalized by this analysis.
Still, I find it interesting to see the kinds of players at the bottom (and the top) of these kinds of lists.
As I foreshadowed, there is a heavy preponderance of guards and wings who live and die by the three-pointer at the bottom. Green and Simons, in particular, are the only qualifying players who have ranked in the bottom ten of this list for each of the four years I’ve done it, a testament to their enduring commitment to inconsistency!
Curry is worth special consideration. He had a slow start to the season before picking things up. He also suffers from having too-high highs, as he had two of the season’s seven highest Game Scores (a 52/10/8 performance against Memphis and 56 points on just 25 shots against Orlando)! Unbelievable performances like those can contribute to a higher standard deviation, and Curry is somewhat punished for being one of the few players capable of reaching such Olympian heights. Curry’s inclusion near the bottom is a good reminder that consistent isn’t the same thing as great, even if the two concepts are linked.
I’m more interested in the players on here who don’t fit something resembling that archetype: Ja Morant, RJ Barrett, Miles Bridges, and Paolo Banchero.
Morant shoots somewhat fewer threes than the other guards on this list, but his strength (attacking the rim) wasn’t quite as strong as it used to be. He shot fewer layups (and followed through on his promise to stop dunking) and more floaters, which could be a sign of injuries sapping his athleticism and ability to beat the defense. Morant’s assist rate also dropped while his turnover rate rose dramatically (from 11% to 14%), culminating in a rather uneven season for the Grizzly superstar.
Barrett’s inconsistency was less a function of him and more a result of his fluctuating role. He took on a huge offensive burden for large parts of the season when Scottie Barnes and Immanuel Quickley were missing, but he receded somewhat when they returned (a very similar story to Norman Powell and his change with and without Kawhi Leonard, in fact).
Statistically, Miles Bridges actually does fall into the category of high-volume three-point shooter despite his size and position; he attempted eight triples per 36 minutes last season (somehow 0.1 more than Powell!) and missed the vast majority of them. I didn’t fully appreciate before this exercise just how, uh, bold he was with his shot selection despite shooting just 31% from deep on the year.
Banchero’s inclusion here is a bit concerning if you’re a Paolo fan (which I massively am). His jumper hasn’t improved, and the Magic’s utter lack of spacing last season forced him even further away from the rim, where he excels. I’m hoping Desmond Bane and Tyus Jones can crack open just a hint of breathing room for him… but it’s worth noting that his European counterpart, Franz Wagner, appears on a far different part of this list despite his own struggles from deep and a similar torn oblique muscle (how that happened to two players on the same team is beyond me). We’ll explore that more in a few paragraphs.
In Banchero’s defense, he was one of just five players to have multiple game scores over 40. The others? Curry (two, like Banchero), Antetokounmpo (two), SGA (six), and Jokic (nine). As I noted with Curry, Banchero’s ceiling actually can be a hindrance to consistency, as we’re defining it here. Then again, Banchero also posted two games with a Game Score of 1. That’s less than ideal, and a big reason he ranks so low.
The 14 most consistent NBA stars of the 2024 season
If you’ve read my analysis of this in previous years, it shouldn’t be shocking that MVP candidates are among the most consistent players. The ability to consistently bring greatness is what allows NBA players to append “super” to their stardom.
But there are some shocking names mixed in with your Shai Gilgeous-Alexanders and Nikola Jokics. Behold: