Do consistent minutes make a player consistent?
June 16, 2008
“He’s their most consistent player.”
It’s a quote you hear rather often watching NBA telecasts. Usually it seems pretty accurate and its hard to argue with, but do our eyes deceive us? I decided to take a look at who the most consistent players in the league really are. And, then I’ll analyze whether or not coaches can make their team more consistent by playing their guys consistent minutes.
First, a word on the methodology. If you ever took statistics, you’ve heard of the standard deviation (SD), and, everyone knows what an average is. Well, if you took even more statistics, you might have heard of the coefficient of variation (CV), which is simply the SD divided by the average. The CV tells us how widely dispersed a sample is, or, on the flip side, how consistent it is. A low CV means the sample is consistent. The useful property of the CV, for our purposes, is that it can be compared between players even when their averages aren’t close (ie. Lebron James‘ scoring consistency can be compared to Kwame Brown’s), and, thus, we can use it to rank every player in the league in terms of consistency.
So, without further ado, here are the 10 most consistent scorers in the 2007-08 regular season:
| Player | PP48 | SD | CV | |
| Corey | Maggette | 29.71 | 6.61 | 0.22 |
| Amare | Stoudemire | 35.58 | 8.23 | 0.23 |
| LeBron | James | 35.76 | 8.44 | 0.24 |
| Andre | Iguodala | 24.11 | 6.13 | 0.25 |
| Carmelo | Anthony | 34.13 | 8.83 | 0.26 |
| Kevin | Garnett | 27.69 | 7.35 | 0.27 |
| Allen | Iverson | 30.62 | 8.14 | 0.27 |
| Kobe | Bryant | 34.89 | 9.32 | 0.27 |
| Dwyane | Wade | 30.18 | 8.10 | 0.27 |
| Yao | Ming | 28.03 | 7.66 | 0.27 |
As you probably would have guessed, the highest scorers are generally the most consistent scorers as they can count on their shot attempts from game to game while role players take what they can get. It would be very unlikely a player could average, say 10 points per game, and consistently do that every game. Kevin Garnett and Andre Iguodala, though, stand out a bit given their lower averages, relatively speaking. If a longer list were listed, you would see that Chris Kaman is the only guy in the top 30 who averages less than 15 PPG.
And, now here are the 10 players who get the most consistent minutes:
| Player | MPG | SD | CV | |
| Richard | Jefferson | 38.98 | 3.81 | 0.10 |
| Al | Jefferson | 35.52 | 3.63 | 0.10 |
| Andre | Iguodala | 39.52 | 4.40 | 0.11 |
| LeBron | James | 40.27 | 4.86 | 0.12 |
| Lamar | Odom | 38.07 | 4.76 | 0.13 |
| Rashard | Lewis | 38.06 | 4.77 | 0.13 |
| Tony | Parker | 33.49 | 4.19 | 0.13 |
| Antawn | Jamison | 38.75 | 4.85 | 0.13 |
| Dirk | Nowitzki | 35.97 | 4.57 | 0.13 |
| Caron | Butler | 39.76 | 5.08 | 0.13 |
So, interestingly, there is an overlap of two players who are on both top 10 lists (Andre Iguodala and Lebron James). Of course these players are both stars and you would expect them to rank in at least the top 30, but it’s curious why other stars aren’t ranking. Kevin Martin, for example, was the 7th leading scorer this season, but ranked only 44th in scoring consistency. Could this possibly have something do to with the fact that he got only the 29th most consistent minutes in the league? Would Kings coach Reggie Theus get more consistency out of his top scorer if he were to give him more consistent minutes? Not surprisingly, the injury-prone Tracy McGrady ranked the least consistent scorer of anyone averaging over 20 PPG.
This all leads us to the question of whether or not coaches would be wise to play their players on a more consistent basis to get more consistent scoring output. What is the correlation between consistency of minutes and consistency of scoring? Correlation, to refresh your memory, is a number between -1 and 1, indicating how closely related two variables are in either a negative or positive direction. A correlation over 0.5 is considered strong in the positive direction.
It is probably not surprising, then, that if we take all the players in the league we get a very strong correlation of 0.79 between consistency of scoring and consistency of minutes. This is a very strong correlation, but not all that useful since we already know that players who don’t play much are less consistent than those who play regularly (in other words, if a guy is so consistent, he’d probably be playing more anyways). It’s a lot more useful to break the players down into groups based on their MPG. So here is what we get:
| MPG | Correlation |
| Less than 10 | 0.37 |
| 10 to 19.99 | 0.60 |
| 20 to 29.99 | 0.51 |
| 30 or more | 0.53 |
Looking at those numbers above, one can make a good argument that guys who get the most consistent minutes score more consistently. Even for players who play less than 10 minutes per game, there is a moderate correlation. It’s really intriguing when you look at the 30 or more category. We might assume that guys who are playing 30 or more minutes must be pretty consistent as a group to earn that kind of time, but the numbers show that the more consistent their burn the most consistent their scoring is.
So, are you surprised by any of the names on the list or the results?
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[...] few weeks back we looked at the most consistent scorers in the NBA and found that Corey Maggette of the LA Clippers topped the list. But, what about the most [...]