A.P. Hoops: On the Rebound

Jamar Brown's ability to clean the glass on the offensive end has Springfield extending possession after possession this year.
Dave Eggen/NBAE via Getty Images

Now that we’ve covered the first two of Dean Oliver’s “Factors of Basketball Success,” shooting (eFG%) and ball control (TORatio), it’s time to take on lucky number 3: rebounding.

You know the basics. Rebounds happen when somebody grabs the ball after a missed shot or free throw. They come in two flavors: offensive and defensive. They're typically measured using per-game averages or raw totals.

And that's the problem. Teams that play at an elevated pace typically have more shots and free throw attempts -- and, thus, more rebounding opportunities. In addition, a team with a high field goal percentage misses fewer shots, and therefore creates fewer rebounding opportunities. The opposite is true in both cases. So, it's safe to say that raw rebounding totals or per-game averages don't truly do justice to a player's rebounding ability.

So now that we’ve rejected conventional rebounding statistics, where does that leave us? And how do we burrow down to the truth? As you’ve probably already figured out, APBRmetrics has a solution: rebound percentage. Much like the rebound stat itself, rebound percentage can relate to, offensive rebound percentage (OREB%), defensive rebound percentage (DREB%) or both. Instead of making calculations based on pace-influenced totals, OREB% and DREB% measure the percentage of available rebounds a team secures. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how many rebounding opportunities a team is given per game, but rather, how efficiently it converts those opportunities.

You can see that the formulas create a fraction where the numerator (top number) indicates the number of offensive or defensive rebounds a team secures, while the denominator (bottom) measures the total number of available rebounds on that end of the floor. OppDREB and OppOREB give us the number of defensive or offensive rebounds, respectively, secured by the opposition.

Below I have included the list of NBA D-League teams ranked by OREB% and DREB%. The charts feature all elements of each formula as well as the per-game rebounding stats to account for differences in games played. When examining the data, take notice of the fact that the ranking of teams according to OREB/gm and DREB/gm does not directly correlate with OREB% and DREB% rankings. For instance, the Texas Legends have a higher OREB% than the Fort Wayne Mad Ants and Bakersfield Jam despite securing fewer OREB/gm than both of those teams.

Note: All data was provided by NBA StatsCube.