Which NBA players have been the most and least consistent this season?
Consistency, praised by coaches to the point of hyperbole, is always difficult to find over the grind of the NBA's 82-game regular season. That's become even more of a challenge recently, with coronavirus-related absences leaving many of the league's teams playing makeshift lineups that change from game to game due to health and safety protocols.
Still, some players have managed to be steadier than others. That's not always a good thing, since inconsistently good play is surely preferable to a consistent average level, but it's helpful for understanding what to expect from players and teams.
With that in mind, I've used per-minute performance on a game-by-game basis this season to rank the most and least consistent players in the NBA. Let's take a look at the results, including a star point guard whose metronomic play should come as no surprise and another whose inconsistency has hardly been an issue for his team and stands in contrast to his more consistent co-star.
The method
Part of the challenge of measuring consistency is defining it. I decided to use a per-minute version of John Hollinger's game score metric then looked at the standard deviation from game to game.
As a last step, I accounted for two factors that tend to affect the spread of game-by-game ratings: minutes per game and overall average game score per 36 minutes. The more minutes played, the more consistent they tend to be, while higher game scores can artificially produce a higher standard deviation because the same relative change in performance is greater in absolute terms.
My final ranking, limited to players who have seen at least 500 minutes of action, is determined relative to the expected standard deviation.
The NBA's most consistent players: Two PGs lead the list
George Hill is precisely the sort of veteran whom coaches tend to value for reliability. Hill's consistency has been useful for a Milwaukee Bucks team with players filtering in and out of the lineup all season.
When it comes to star players, Chris Paul is in a league of his own in terms of consistency. Among those with an average game score per 36 minutes of at least 15 (a mark Paul crushes), nobody else has a lower standard deviation than Ivica Zubac (5.6). If we raise the bar to an average of at least 17, just two other players have a standard deviation lower than 6: Kevin Durant, another stable leading scorer, and more surprisingly Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks.
Led by Paul, the Phoenix Suns are Team Reliable. Mikal Bridges also cracks the top 10, noteworthy for a player whose offensive value depends heavily on knocking down 3-pointers, while Deandre Ayton isn't far outside it. Of the nine Phoenix players to see at least 500 minutes of action this season, just three have been more inconsistent than expected: guards Devin Booker, Cameron Payne and Landry Shamet.
Draymond Green is the other All-Star in the top 10. His consistency this season has been another indication of Green being more locked in than he was in 2020-21, when he was only slightly below his expected standard deviation. Remarkably, Green had 12 games last season with a weaker game score than his lowest so far in 2021-22 (5.1).
Inconsistency isn't always a bad thing -- right, Steph?
At the other end of the extreme, Kelly Oubre Jr. has been far and away the league's most hot-and-cold performer this season. He is one of just 18 players leaguewide with multiple game scores of 30 or better, but he also has three outings with negative game scores.
Then there's Stephen Curry, the proof that inconsistency isn't always such a bad thing. It's not that Curry has thrown up a lot of clunkers; he has had a double-digit game score in 28 of his 31 contests, tied for second in the NBA, behind Donovan Mitchell (29). Instead, Curry has been consistently good and sporadically transcendent, including a 48.6 game score in his 50-point game against the Atlanta Hawks that is far and away the NBA's best performance this season. (Joel Embiid is second on the list with a 40.8 game score.)
When Curry is at his best, the Warriors are nearly unbeatable. They're 8-0 with an average victory margin of 16.3 points in games during which he has posted a game score of 25 or better.
As a second-year player carrying a heavy offensive load for the Orlando Magic, Cole Anthony is a more conventionally inconsistent leading scorer. Anthony's best efforts have helped Orlando pull upsets over the Utah Jazz and at the New York Knicks, while the Magic's record is 1-7 with all seven losses by double digits when he is limited to a game score in the single digits.
Somewhat surprisingly, Jalen Green is an outlier as an up-and-down rookie. On average, the rookies who have played at least 500 minutes have been somewhat more consistent than expected, with Scottie Barnes and Josh Giddey foremost among the steady first-year players.
Green's value has ebbed and flowed with his 3-point shooting. He posted a season-high 24.5 game score when he shot 8-of-10 from beyond the arc, but he has gone a combined 6-of-45 in his 10 weakest games, which have yielded a game score worse than six.
Behind Curry, Jayson Tatum has been the league's next most uneven star player. Tatum's four performances with a game score of 30 or better are surpassed only by MVP candidates Nikola Jokic (6), Giannis Antetokounmpo and Durant (5 each). Yet Tatum's average score is nowhere in their stratosphere, in large part because of six games with a score worse than 10. Although Tatum's best games haven't always translated into Celtics victories, the team is 3-8 in his 11 weakest outings of the season.