Consistency
Here’s a little slice from a John Hollinger chat earlier this week:
hassan (Baltimore): Drew Gooden – MIP?
John Hollinger: Most Inconsistent Player? They give an award for that?
You hear a lot about “consistency” in sports and most of it’s BS. Fans look at a player who’s above average some days, and below average other days, and then instead of concluding that he’s a mediocre player they say he needs to be “more consistent.” But by that they mean they want him to play as well as he does on his best nights every night. In the real world, of course, nobody does that. Even a great slugger doesn’t consistently hit home runs on a nightly basis; Chris Paul has better games and worse ones.
But consistency is a real property, and I always think it’s something that it would be interesting to take a look at. Players’ performance varies. But how much does the average player’s performance vary? And are there some players with substantially larger-than-usual standard deviations in key categories? Inquiring minds want to know.
40 Responses to “Consistency”
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October 8th, 2008 at 8:57 am
If you want to identify a consistent player, look at Albert Pujols.
He’s pretty consistent year in and out and even month to month this past season.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:06 am
In a financial crisis, the correlations always go to one. Which means that until the contagion is stopped, Drew Gooden will have a lousy season.
—–
“But how much does the average player’s performance vary?”
An average amount.
“And are there some players with substantially larger-than-usual standard deviations in key categories?”
Yes.
“Inquiring minds want to know.”
Glad to be able to help.
—–
And I will reiterate my call for Matthew to blog about Giberto on Jeopardy…
October 8th, 2008 at 9:11 am
you’d probably want to filter out for those whose inconsistent performance is the result of injury.
there are also injury-prone players, and they may be inconsistent as a result, but that’s not the phenomenon of interest.
the real question is about inconsistent performance against a background of consistent health.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am
“And are there some players with substantially larger-than-usual standard deviations in key categories?”
Obviously, the way to do this properly would be to plug numbers into a spreadsheet, but operating off of intuition, (which is often wrong in cases like these), I’d guess that as a rule, very young and very old players would have substantially larger-than-usual standard deviations in key categories than players in their prime.
For example, I’d be pretty confident in the guess that Linas Kleiza had larger standard deviations in key categories last year than Allen Iverson, or that Sam Cassell had larger standard deviations in key categories last year than Paul Pierce.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I don’t know if there are any studies on consistency but there are elements of a players game that are more consistent. Chauncy Billups may have a bad shooting night but he usually does a very good job of taking care of the basketball (low turnovers) and shoots about 90% from the FT line. Individual defense is something that is consistent.
3-pt shooters are inconsistent because they don’t take enough shots in any given game for their average 3-pt FG% to be revealed. A 40% 3-pt shooter is a great shooter but that means he hits 40 shots out of 100, not 2 out of every 5 night after night.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:19 am
“you’d probably want to filter out for those whose inconsistent performance is the result of injury. there are also injury-prone players, and they may be inconsistent as a result, but that’s not the phenomenon of interest.”
Disagree. Injury is part of the game.
Before last season, the Nuggets essentially traded Steve Blake for Chucky Atkins. My thoughts on the exchange at the time was that it wasn’t a bad move, except for the fact that as an aging small guard, Atkins was more prone to injury than the younger Blake.
And as it turned out, Atkins missed almost all of last season with injuries. That is inconsistency.
Similarly, the primary problem with overpaying Agent Zero was the risk of inconsistency due to a lousy knee.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:24 am
“Individual defense is something that is consistent.”
No. Some individual defenders are consistent, and some are not.
For example, Carmelo Anthony always plays excellent individual defense when matched up against LBJ. But he often plays sloppy defense against lesser players.
“3-pt shooters are inconsistent because they don’t take enough shots in any given game for their average 3-pt FG% to be revealed.”
Absolute gibberish.
If you ran the numbers, you’d find that some 3-pt shooters are more consistent than others.
A low percentage shot is no more conducive to inconsistency than a high percentage shot.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:34 am
The biggest source of inconsistancy is in shooting, however, that is a good thing, not a bad thing. You can feed the hot hand and relegate a guy with an off night to 3rd option or even the bench. You’re much better off having 3-5 inconsistant scorers than having 3-5 consistent ones. You really only need two on the court at a time.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Footballoutsiders.com, which has the most advanced football statistics on the web, actually measures a team’s consistency from game to game.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:15 am
One of the difficulties in measuring this is that one game doesn’t really produce enough stats to be able to perceive a player’s actual level of performance during that game. Shooting % being a good example.
But I think the real problem is that many marginal stars have limited facets to their game. Against teams that can’t defend them properly or just game plan properly, they have good nights. But when a team wants to take away what they can do, they’re going to look ‘inconsistent’, but I don’t think that has much to do with the player.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:20 am
In “Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame” Bill James actually did research on whether high or low year-to-year variance in performance of baseball players was more likely to result in world series wins. In that context, high variance was better.
Its probably the case that good teams want low variance, and bad teams want high variance, but I’ve got nothing to back that up.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:26 am
“ut I think the real problem is that many marginal stars have limited facets to their game. Against teams that can’t defend them properly or just game plan properly, they have good nights. But when a team wants to take away what they can do, they’re going to look ‘inconsistent’, but I don’t think that has much to do with the player.”
Sure it has to do with the player. You identify it yourself when you refer to “marginal stars”.
Kobe can get his shot off against most defensive schemes and personnel. That’s what makes him a genuine star. But more marginal stars depend on the situation being in their favor to be able to get off, and hence will generally tend to be more inconsistent.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Njorl (#8) – Why do you assume players who start out “hot” will finish hot? This is often not the case.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Re: Defense
Carmelo Anthony may have solid defensive skills but so what? Defense isn’t simply a skill. It’s skill + effort. Inconsistent effort is what makes Carmelo Anthony a inconsistent defender.
Tayshaun Prince is a good defender. He’s skilled and gives a solid effort. Because Tayshaun Prince is skilled and gives a consistent effort, he’s a consistently good defender.
Re: 3-pt shooting
Below are the 3-pt shooting lines from two 3-point shooters who have played in the same system together for several years. I choose the first 10 games in January ‘07 at random.
R. Wallace 3-7, 5-7, 2-4, 1-1, 1-4, 0-3, 0-3, 0-2, 1-6, 0-3
T. Prince 0-2, 0-1, 1-3, 0-2, 0-3, 2-4, 0-0, 1-2, 1-3, 2-2
Wallace shot 32.5% for the stretch, 35.6% for the season.
Prince shot 31.8% for the stretch, 36.5% for the season.
Wallace has a reputation for being inconsistent in large part because on some nights he falls in love with the three (twice as many as Prince) which sometimes go in (5-7, hooray!) and sometimes don’t (1-6, boo!). But Rasheed Wallace shoots about the same percentage as Prince, it’s just that 1-6 looks worse on the stat sheet than 0-3 two nights in a row.
Re: The “hot hand”
There are a handful of players in NBA history who could get a good shot off no matter the defense, the rest all do better or worse depending on the defense. When LeBron James scored 48 points a few years ago against the Pistons in a playoff game people thought it was maybe as good as Jordan’s 63 against the Celtics but James was only a very good 18-33 from the field, not superhuman. He was unstoppable at the end of the game not because he was “hot” but because Tayshaun Prince was fatigued and giving the equally athletic James about 60 pounds of muscle, and the Pistons didn’t adjust on defense. “Hot” had very little to do with it. LeBron James’s being strong as hell, and 22 years old, and a tremendously skilled basketball player had a LOT to do with it.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:43 am
quite a few years back (i have it in my office, but i’m not there right now), bill james ran a study he called “1000 years of willie mays.”
he ran (obviously) 1000 years of seasonal simulations with every other player being an “average” player and willie mays being willie mays (based on career norms).
and while i suspect that this is much truer of baseball than football or basketball, the variation was enormous, just enormous. which is to say that even one of the handful of greatest baseball players ever was capable of lots and lots of inconsistency.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:46 am
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I don’t know about 1000 years of Willie Mays, though that sounds fascinating.
But how about eleven years of Tim Duncan, with the Spurs winning percentage in each of his seasons.
October 8th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I would also like to see a measure of variability juxtaposed against the level of competition.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Re: the Bill James stuff. I don’t Matthew (or Hollinger) is talking about year-to-year inconsistency. I think they’re talking about game-to-game inconsistency. So I don’t think the Bill James stuff is appropriate to the point of the post. Year-to-year, my impression is that basketball players are just more consistent than baseball players.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Laker fan here.
I’ll throw Lamar Odom under the bus as an inconsistent player. The problem is what Matt alluded to at the end of his post on the subject.
When someone says a player is inconsistent, what they are really saying is that they have huge swings of production from game to game.
Lamar Odom is a prime example of this. One night he’ll get you 20 points and 18 rebounds. The next he’ll get you 5 points and seven rebounds. As a fan, it is incredibly frustrating because you never know how much production you can count on from Odom from game to game.
It is particularly aggravating because Odom is NOT a mediocre player. He’s a very good player who has a tendency to drift in and out of focus. When he’s focused, he fills the stat sheet. When he isn’t focused you forget he’s even on the floor.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
The inherent game to game inconsisntency associated with low shot attempts makes the analysis a bit messier, but it’s something that can be compensated for. There’s a fixed level of variance that you would expect in, say, FG% from night to night given a number of shot attempts, assuming that there’s a constant underlying “true” FG%. That is, if you assume every single shot by a player has the exact same chance of going in, it’s straightforward to compute the expected distribution of FG%’s by game.
Given that, you can compare a player’s observed FG%’s with the predicted ones, to find out if they are more or less consistent than one would expect, and compare player to player how much more or less consistent they are than a truly random chance would suggest.
I remember reading about a similar analysis years ago, which supposedly demonstrated that there was no such thing as a hot streak in shooting, in a predictive sense. The fact that someone had been shooting well up to a given point did not make it more likely that they’d make their next shot. So “hot streaks” are solely a matter of random statistical fluctuations, rather than reflecting a true case of players shooting better or worse at a given time.
I didn’t look at the underlying data to see if the analysis held up. And from personal experience, there certainly seem to be games where I just don’t have it, and I know I don’t–every shot is a brick. So I’m not sure. On the other hand, tying it back into the original theme of the article, I’d bet a professional basketball player is far more consistent from game to game than I am, given how little I practice any more.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Matthew,
You might be interested in the literature on the so-called “hot hand fallacy”. Here’s a review article to get you started.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I’m betting there’s a ton of bias in impressions of “inconsistency.” Take the Odom argument: “As a fan, it is incredibly frustrating because you never know how much production you can count on from Odom from game to game.”
That’s true with almost any player. Kobe probably has swings that are as dramatic as Odom’s, but instead of from “good to shit” you get “good to great.” Odom’s shit-nights tend to really stick out (as do his good nights), while Kobe’s ok nights are excused and his great nights praised. The variance, I would imagine, is probably pretty even.
Paul Molitor, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn are constantly held up as models of consistency. Actually, they’re just consistently better than everyone else.
October 8th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
“I don’t Matthew (or Hollinger) is talking about year-to-year inconsistency. I think they’re talking about game-to-game inconsistency.”
I bet Vince Carter would rank high on the inconsistency scale.
—–
So, are you amped for the Sean Williams era, Al?
October 8th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
“It is particularly aggravating because Odom is NOT a mediocre player. He’s a very good player who has a tendency to drift in and out of focus. When he’s focused, he fills the stat sheet. When he isn’t focused you forget he’s even on the floor.”
Disagree.
I think Lamar is the best Lamar he can be. I don’t think it’s a question of focus.
Lamar has a limited game because he can’t sink the perimeter shot. He depends on other players opening up the floor for him, and thus is dependent on the game flow in the way of the “marginal star” as defined above.
Lamar produces inconsistent stats because he’s not in control of his own destiny on the court.
October 8th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
“He was unstoppable at the end of the game not because he was “hot” but because Tayshaun Prince was fatigued and giving the equally athletic James about 60 pounds of muscle, and the Pistons didn’t adjust on defense. “Hot” had very little to do with it. LeBron James’s being strong as hell, and 22 years old, and a tremendously skilled basketball player had a LOT to do with it.”
To summarize your comment, LBJ is a consistent player.
October 8th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
My guess is that consistency tracks pretty closely how good you are on average. In other words, high PER players tend to have a lower standard deviation night to night.
The reason is: what makes players “consistent”? The fact that they have go-to moves and superior abilities that make it hard to shut them down through scouting, hard to take them out of their game, and hard to bench them. So the best players get solid playing time every night, they succeed against a variety of different teams and defenses, and they have moves and abilities that you can’t simply adjust to. Inconsistency doesn’t come from being lazy some nights, it comes from having a big game because you nit a few lucky shots while the other defense is busy double-teaming LBJ, then the next night youy aren’t so lucky.
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