Sustainability

How it works

When a player suddenly scores more, there are two stories. They are doing more: more minutes, more shots. Or the same shots are going in more often. The first tends to stick. The second is mostly borrowed, and borrowed points get paid back.

Sustainability Score tells the two apart, and the fact that makes it measurable is blunt: shooting accuracy never settles down, not even across twenty games. So when a player's recent accuracy sits far above what they themselves have shot across the years, most of that gap is luck wearing a jersey. The score runs from 1 — the scoring is exactly what this shot volume at the player's own normal accuracy produces — down to 0, far out of line with who they have been.

The number carries a sentence you can use: a player averaging 16 whose usual accuracy on this shot diet supports about 12.5 should expect the difference to melt. Tested against five seasons of history, players flagged as running hot gave most of the extra back, players flagged as running cold got theirs back, and players in line with themselves stayed put.

For a while the score carried a refinement: a hot stretch that arrived together with a real role change was treated as more believable, because a changed game ought to explain part of a jump. It was withdrawn. Re-tested, it reversed on exactly the case it was built for, and an adjustment that only ever moves a score upward is the kind worth being strict about. So a hot streak now scores the same whether or not the role moved — and "does a changed role make a hot streak more believable" has an honest answer: we tested it twice and could not show it.

Baseball has its own version built on balls in play. Once a ball is struck into the field, whether it lands for a hit is barely about the hitter over any stretch short enough to care about, so a month where everything drops in is borrowed in exactly the same way.

Football's version, new for the 2026 season, reads yards per touch — a player's last 40 targets or last 100 carries against their own two-year level — because per-touch yardage never settles down within a season either. Touchdowns get the treatment the test demanded, and it is the honest surprise: we expected touchdown rates to be borrowed luck, tested it, and the test said otherwise — a player's touchdown rate relative to their own history is partly skill. So the score never promises touchdown regression; it says when the yards are borrowed, and it reports a touchdown surge as context instead of discounting it.