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Hi all,
Based on a conversation I was having with a Vassell stan on the Spurs subReddit, I ended up doing a little bit of a Tuesday night stat session. I'll eventually expand this to look at some other Spurs, but essentially I made a comment that Vassell is inconsistent and someone challenged me on that. Seems like people here appreciate some stat drops, so I figured I'd share it here. Below is a copy/paste from what I posted on Reddit, with some additional references.
I'll look to run some similar stats for our other players, and their levels of consistency. I can also go back and do this for historical players if you are curious, so long as their GameLogs are available in BBRef (it at least goes back to Tim Duncan's rookie season). One thing I won't do is go calculate every player in the NBA, but I'm happy to pull the statistics for specifically requested players. Just tell me the player and the year you are curious in and I'll get to it when I can (you have to tell me both. I won't go through the effort to look at multi-year periods)
The Reddit post is below.
First I wanted to establish a baseline of what cons utes consistency. To that I just googled "most consistent NBA players" and thankfully it brought me to one of my favorite analytic sites, CraftedNBA: https://craftednba.com/player-traits/consistency
I like that they use GameScore to measure consistency, because I've done the same in other data projects I've done to where I was looking at how whether or not certain players having a good game or a bad game was correlated with winning and losing (spoiler alert: when Wemby has a good game, we are more likely to win... when he has a bad game, we are far more likely to lose... you probably could have guessed this). NOTE NOT FROM THE REDDIT POST: here is my post on how GameScore correlates to wins/losses. https://www.spurstalk.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=304748. I like the way CraftedNBA has scaled GameScore to each individual player in their methodology and I think I'll go back to this post and update it with these breakouts rather than the hard and fast cut offs. That will come at a later date.
I randomly picked four guys, kind of scattered throughout the list. I ended up with KD, Fox, Desmond Bane and Jalen Williams. You can go to the link I provided and check out everyone else, I just wanted to include 4 random guys in a summary table for comparison purposes. There is nothing special about the 4 guys I randomly chose.
I calculated the same consistency metric for Devin as the site uses (which I like, especially in that it is scaled for each individual player. A great game for Vassell is not the same as a great game for KD. You can look at the site, and it explains what is a great game (basically, greater than 125% of the player's average GameScore, a Good Game is +/- 25% of the players Average, a Fair game is between 50 and 75% of the player's average, and a Poor Game is below 50% of the Player's average Game Score. I've included a note on GameScore at the end of this post)).
Here is what I found:
As expected, 1) Devin isn't nearly as consistent as these guys and 2) as expected his consistency is significantly lower this year.
One thing that stands out is the percentage of great games Devin had in the previous two seasons. On the surface level, this seems like a good thing - but it actually feeds into his relative inconsistency. You'll see in the link I provided, Jokic (rated the most consistent) has the lowest % of "Great Games" because all of his games are great compared to other players and to hit 125% of that would be rather extraordinary. The "most inconsistent" version of this statistic would be if 50% of your games were "Great" and the other 50% were "Poor". To be consistent, you want the bulk of your games to fall into the "Good" bucket.
To further illustrate this, I calculated the standard deviation of Devin's Game Score in each of the last 3 years, and also the standard deviation of the game score for the 4 guys I randomly selected. I then took that Standard Deviation as a percentage of the average, which tells us that 68% of all the players Games fall within X% of their average. The X being the number I have reported below:
Dev 22-23: 48.7%
Dev 23-24: 51.7%
Dev 24-25: 56.8%
KD: 28.7%
Fox: 42.3%
Bane: 43.1%
JWill: 43.2%
A smaller number here is better. Basically, you can read this as "In 2024-25, 68% of Devin's games result in a GameScore within 56.8% of his Average GameScore". That sounds kind of convoluted, but basically tells us how tight of a range his game outcomes are.
So... at the end of the day, Devin is definitely becoming more inconsistent. I also stand by my assertation that he is quite inconsistent.
A note on GameScore: it's a composite metric of all of a players box score contributions in a game. It's not perfect, but it's the best that we really have to measure all of the box score contributions on a game by game basis. It's kind of like PER, but on a game by game basis. Not great at measuring true game impact, but a good measure of counting stats.
This is the content I come here for.
im just insulted that you cheated on ST with reddit
Good post, scott. Although it beats a dead horse for me. Vassell has definitely been inconsistent this season. What differentiates my outlook from yours is the fact that he had good-to-great seasons by and large in the last two seasons (by the above metric). And suffered an injury that is generally debilitating and weakening in a metatarsal stress fracture before this season. Instreetclothes has written about metatarsal injuries and how recoveries from this type of injury is relatively slow. So despite his being maddeningly inconsistent, I still believe that Vassell can be given the benefit of doubt and be played as a Starter (fourth option behind Wemby, Fox, Castle) till he gets into a groove by the end of this season. Next season, perhaps if he doesn't ..the Spurs can count on him as a trade or a bench piece. Best case, if he does improve his consistency.. he will be a viable starter for some more years.
tbh who cares.
There are only 2 groups of Spurs player now:
Untradable (Wemby, Fox, Castle) and the rest.
This is the content I come here for.
Just further shows how much of an abject ing disaster Vassell has been this year.
Get paid a giant contract, watch your stats fall off the face of the Earth. Just wonderful.
It sometimes never happens at all. That’s the injury that killed James Anderson’s Spurs and eventually his NBA career.
Y'all may be on to something. I've said this in other threads, but Vassell's three-pointer looks broken. He is leaning forward into his shot just to get it to the basket....like he has no legs or lift. Wonder if these two could be related...
Great work, scott!
Is this data factoring in the cold, hard fact that Vassell has turned a corner?
He'll most likely need a full offseason to really get back to the player he was last season. His time is ticking though. Castle clearly has to start at SG and I'm not for playing 3-guard line ups, so 6th man might really be his only way to stay on the team. If he can't give you 20 PPG with decent defense, he's overpaid.
I don't think it's the same injury that James Anderson had exactly, is it? I remember it being called the 5th metatarsal. I don't know who else has had whatever injury Vassell had and how they've recovered on it, but I don't think it's the same one as what JA had. Having said, I've been wondering if that injury and consequent surgery has set him back. Things just don't look the same. When he's shooting the ball, it just doesn't look that same as previous years, so I do think he's not right. I have been down on him and upset with his play, but I do have in the back of my mind that he's not fully recovered, or maybe the injury has caused him issues that he's still recovering from.
My condolences for having to interact with somebody on /r/sniff, tbh.
Your first mistake was engaging with the snifflords on Reddit tbh. They make Body look tame by comparison
Good work on the deep dive into the stats though, even though anyone who isn't sniffing PATFO butthole already knew this
Let's amp up the energy around here so I don't have to! This forum gets pretty dead on non-gamedays!
ST.com always first in my heart
I will say this particular poster I was going back and forth with on Reddit is good to debate with. Doesn't get emotional, sticks to facts, brings good arguments, etc. Is registration still closed here? Maybe I'll invite them over if not.
Some additional context to this analysis that I explained to this person who had some rebuttals, which I'll post below because I think it's helpful for understanding.
- Redditor Rebuttal #1: you say there’s nothing special about the 4 you picked, but they’re all max players (assuming Williams gets a max this summer), including one of the maybe 5 best, most consistent scorers of all time. Makes me wonder how he stacks up versus a different caliber of player
- My response to #1: Each of the four guys are among the Top 35 most consistent players in the NBA is probably the best way to sum it up, because that's the table I picked them off of. But the thing about the way this is measured, is that their "Great/Good/Fair/Poor breakdown is scaled for each individual player. What cons utes a good game for Devin is not the same as what cons utes a good game for any of those other guys (and to that point, the threshold for what cons utes a "good" game for Devin is actually a "poor" game for KD, and a "great" game from Devin is only a "fair game" for KD, etc). Just something to keep in mind, that the caliber of the player overall is already factored out of the comparison. I'll also just say that I wasn't comparing Devin to any of those guys, but I wanted to include some players on the table who are measured as very consistent (they're in the top 10% of consistency in the entire league after all) for a frame of reference. But I'll give some other examples of how Devin stacks up below.
- Redditor Rebuttal #2: by the definition, yes a great game is a measure on inconsistency. But when a fan labels a player inconsistent, they aren’t really talking about how often they’re awesome, it’s more a critique of how often they’re bad. A guy that reliably scored 15 every game and then 30 once every other week wouldn’t be called inconsistent. That’s my take anyways
- My Response to #2: I understand it is kind of counterintuitive to say that a "great game" means he's inconsistency - but you kind of have to. What we are labelling a "great game" isn't even necessarily a "great game" by objective standards, it's just an outlier game versus their normal performance. For example, you can have two players who average ten points a game. Player 1 scores exactly 10 every game. They are perfectly consistent. Player two scores 20 in two games, 0 in two games, and 5 in the the last game. His average is also 10ppg, but he had two "great games". We count those games as inconsistent because they are outliers against his normal performance and cloud our evaluation of his performance if we just look at averages. Definitionally, every "great" game a player has must be offset by a poor or fair game for the averages to work. So yes, while we don't view a "great" game in the context of something we don't want - they are still a measure of inconsistency.
- Redditor Response #3: I look at year 3 and 4 and my takeaway is he’s good to great 2/3s of the time, and he’s fair to great almost 90% of the time. I’m not sure how you can look at that data set and maintain he’s quite inconsistent
- My Response to #3: t's all in the eye of the beholder. You look at the data and say "50% or better of his game score average 90% of the time, sounds consistent to me!". The first part of the statement (50% or better of his average 90% of the time) and the second is subjective ("sounds consistent"). But is it really? We can only really evaluating that by comparison.
- I maintain the proper way of looking at this is GoodGame%, which is the % of his games that are within +/- 25% of his average GameScore. If I run a query of Shooting Guards with over 500 minutes played and a minimum Offensive Load (as defined on Crafted's website) of 30, then that returns 37 players. Devin ranks 29th in consistency. That's only for this year though, and we've both agreed he's been inconsistent this year (but that's all I can run an easy query on). If we popped Devin's last two seasons into this table, just for comparison, it would put him closer to 20th out of 37.
Last edited by scott; 02-19-2025 at 05:35 PM.
I did not include this in my original post, but any Devin Vassell post for now on shall include the footnote that Devin Vassell, in addition to having turned a corner, is also making 3.6 threes per 100 possessions.
Thank you for your forgiveness of my oversight.
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