Last week we tweeted out that we were working on a new stat. I thought I would expand upon that here. It could turn into a stat but it’s at the very least a study on what you can measure about a single rebound.
My first thought was how it affects your field goal percentage. If you’re a pretty good shooting team, but a bad rebounding team, then the fewer offensive rebounds you get, the higher that shooting percentage has to stay in order for you to hit your average point total. Conversely, if you’re not a very good shooting team, you need those offensive rebounds because you need more shots in order to score more.
Keeping all of that in mind, think about how much it kills you to give up an offensive rebound to a good shooting team – they’re that much more relaxed because volume heavily tilts the scales in their favor and really puts pressure on you to keep up offensively. And if you’re playing a team that doesn’t shoot well, every defensive rebound really puts pressure on their offense to all of a sudden become good at scoring the basketball.
Another factor to keep in mind, and will be difficult to measure without seeing shot charts, is how much higher percentage a shot becomes off an offensive rebound. On a simple level, it’s often close to the basket but it’s also an extra possession where the defense is increasingly tired.
Hopefully, all of that gave you something to think about, but we’re going to delve into our numbers and try to come up with a way to quantify all of that in the coming weeks.