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Revisiting Batum's Consistency: A Statistical Analysis (2nd Update in Comments)

Almost a year ago today I wrote an article comparing Nicolas Batum to other starting small forwards. The inspiration for that article was his new, and at the time considered hefty, contract. I concluded based on a number of parameters that Batum was worth the contract he was given. The opposition's main point against the appropriateness of his contract was his consistency or perceived lack thereof. I later added a consistency analysis to the article and concluded that Batum was about as consistent as his peers, though he was the least consistent by a small margin.

Given the recent front page article concerning Batum and the continued questions about his consistency that arose in the comments, I felt it was appropriate to revisit the matter. Like the previous article, I analyzed consistency using the game score metric, developed by John Hollinger. The definition and formula for game score can be found here. I looked at game scores for each regular season game for Batum, Deng, Parsons, George, Leonard, and Gay.

Results

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Using the standard deviation of games scores as an analog for consistency, like last year, we can see that Batum has gone from being the least consistent to the second most consistent. This will probably only be interesting to stats nerds, but I also performed a Kruskal-Wallis analysis of variance (due to unequal sample size and unequal variance) and post-hoc comparison. Somewhat surprisingly, I found no significant difference between Batum's and any other player's game scores. So while I believe standard deviation is a good enough metric and that metric says Batum is the second most consistent among his peers, at the very least he can be said to be no more inconsistent than any of his peers.

Given the contracts awarded to Chandler Parsons and Gordon Hayward (who I neglected to include but would rank 5th out of seven in consistency), I hope we can put to bed the doubts about Batum. Perhaps he isn't yet what he could be, and maybe he will never reach the potential that some of us see in him. But he performs well compared to his peers, many of whom are first and second scoring options on their teams, and does it as consistently or more so than any of them.