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.
