Basketball Bytes: The NBA Players Who Are — And Aren’t — Their Usual Selves This Year
Which players have departed from their previous statistical profiles? Plus, Chris Paul can't help but improve his teams.
Welcome to Basketball Bytes — a weekly NBA column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various basketball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Basketball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
🏀 You’ve Changed, Man
I’ve mentioned before that I keep a Similarity Score system for NBA players, based on their 0-100 percentile ratings (relative to the league) in a bunch of different categories. I decided to update those ratings for 2024-25 on Sunday, which you can find here:
As part of that, I thought it might be interesting to look at players who have strong trends in their similarity scores compared with last season — whether they are especially similar to themselves or, in more unusual cases, especially dissimilar versus their numbers from a year ago.
In terms of the former category, nobody is more similar to themselves this season than Denver’s Nikola Jokić, whose percentiles are almost exactly the same across the two samples of data:
That probably shouldn’t be too surprising. Not only is Jokić preternaturally consistent in his production year after year, but he’s also one of the most unique players in NBA history. If no other player is truly similar to Jokić, then he’s probably also going to be more inclined to be similar to himself between seasons than other players.
But Jokić is not the only star who has been highly consistent since last year. Kevin Durant, Jayson Tatum, Domantas Sabonis, Pascal Siakam, Evan Mobley and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander all rate among the 10 most similar players to the 2023-24 versions of themselves so far:
Generally speaking, stars might be more inclined to profile as similar to themselves year-over-year, since they are less likely to be asked to change roles — and see their other stats warped as a result — than players with lesser reputations. But that didn’t stop Keyonte George, Isaac Okoro and Jabari Smith Jr. from filling out our Top 10 list of similar-to-themselves players this year:
As I hinted at earlier, though, the more fascinating cases are the ones where a player has radically changed his game since a season ago, rating as notably dissimilar from an earlier version of himself.
Nobody fits that category more than Kevon Looney, who has morphed into a totally different player this year:
Looney’s 5 most similar previous seasons to last year were Corie Blount (1997), Himself (2021), Drew Eubanks (2023), Dave Greenwood (1986), DeAndre Jordan (2021) and a rookie Bam Adebayo (2018). This year? Anderson Varejão (2014), Amen Thompson (2024), Jerome Kersey (1992), Zaza Pachulia (2015) and Paul Millsap (2021). He changed from a low-usage, high-efficiency big to a mid-usage, low-efficiency one between seasons, the biggest makeover of any player so far.
Here are the next 10 least similar players to themselves this season:
Some of this just comes down to players who dramatically changed their overall level of play since last season (for better or worse) but Steph Curry stands out as an interesting member of this club — it’s a list he joins due to improved defensive metrics, but also a very different ballhandling profile (and even a slight tweak in 3P frequency) this year.
(Correction: An earlier version of the least-similar table labeled Grayson Allen’s numbers as belonging to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, which has since been fixed.)
🏀 CP3 Always Makes Your Team Better
Analyzing Chris Paul’s career is nothing less than a fascinating exercise.
The future Hall of Famer started out in New Orleans, quickly gaining a reputation as a Point God, then hit his stride with the iconic-if-underachieving Lob City Clippers after the NBA famously nixed a trade that would have sent him to the Lakers to play with Kobe Bryant. By 2016-17, the 31-year-old CP3 had played 12 NBA seasons with two franchises, and he’d already built the résumé of an all-time legend.
Then things started to get weird.
CP3 was traded to the Houston Rockets to help James Harden and company get over the top. It almost worked, too, as Houston led the powerful Warriors 3-2 in the 2018 West Finals before an injury to Paul cost him the rest of the series — and the Rockets were later undone by a staggering 27 straight missed 3s in Game 7.
After another playoff loss to the Warriors, the Rockets dealt CP3 to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Russell Westbrook, in what was supposed to be a rebuilding move. But Paul ended up leading the team in Wins Above Replacement, and OKC went to the playoffs before losing in Game 7 to Paul’s former Houston teammates.
Then CP3 was on the move again, this time in a trade to the Phoenix Suns. Phoenix hadn’t made the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons before 2020-21, but they went all the way to the NBA Finals in Paul’s first season with the club — even holding a 2-0 lead there before dropping four straight to lose the title to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Paul’s Suns won a whopping 64 games the following regular season, with the now 36-year-old PG chipping in a team-best 10.6 WAR. The team flamed out spectacularly in Round 2 of the playoffs, however, and an injury-plagued down season (by his standards) in 2022-23 seemed to indicate that CP3’s prime was finally over.
Once again, Paul was included in a salary-dumping trade — this time to the Golden State Warriors , who wanted to get rid of Jordan Poole’s suddenly onerous contract. But Paul ended up playing surprisingly well for Golden State before a hand injury sidelined him for nearly two months. After the year, CP3 was waived by the Warriors, and the 39-year-old free agent signed a 1-year deal with the San Antonio Spurs.
This probably shouldn’t be surprising by now, but Paul is playing surprisingly well for his new club in 2024-25. He leads the team in Estimated RAPTOR (+4.9) and WAR (1.7), ahead of even young future superstar teammate Victor Wembanyama. And in another unsurprising development, CP3 makes the Spurs better when he’s on the court — easily leading qualified team members in on-court +/- (+4.5) and on-versus-off +/- (+14.7).
That’s nothing new. Across all of his many career stops, CP3’s teams are almost uniformly far better with him in the game versus when he sits:
Recently, he has that notable history of joining younger teams, rebuilding teams, and/or teams with few expectations… and then surprising everyone with how much better he makes them.
The Spurs are no different. While Wemby was expected to take a huge leap forward in his second NBA season, this team also went 22-60 in each of the previous two years, with the league’s second-worst point margin. This year’s Spurs are roughly an average team after accounting for schedule strength — and while Wemby doing things like dropping 50 points has a lot to do with that, San Antonio plays its best when a 39-year-old journeyman Point God is on the court.
Filed under: NBA, Basketball, Basketball Bytes
I never thought about it like that