Having the league's best rebounder and being among the league's worst rebounding teams?

Out rebounding opponents in itself does not mean anything. If the opponents miss a lot, you will out rebound your opponent by virtue of the high percentage inherent in defensive rebounding.

But if you have a relatively low defensive rebounding rate, that means you are also allowing your opponents to get second chance shots more than other teams.

 

Defensive rebounding used to be their focus. They shifted that focus to contesting shots.

 

Oh, I thought u were talking about this guy :grin:

 

How badly does the OREB disparity hurt the Rockets?

Opponents 14.1 OREB at 0.85 PPP = 12 Points per game.
Rockets 10.8 OREB at 0.98 PPP = 10.6 Points per game.

Therefore the Rockets suffer a net point deficit of 1.4 points per game.

We actually can do a better analysis:

Rockets opponents 197 total OREB, 119 OREB turned directly into shots at 0.94 PPP. 78 OREB with another player taking the shot at 0.85 PPP.

(119*0.94) + (78*0.85) = 112 + 66.3 = 178.3 points = 12.7 PPG

Rockets 151 total OREB, 79 OREB turned directly into shots at 1.23 PPP. 72 OREB with another player taking the shot at 0.98 PPP.

(79*1.23) + (72*.98) = 97.2 + 70.5 = 167.7 points = 12 PPG

So the Rockets are only losing 0.7 PPG in the offensive rebound battle. Just shy of the cost of one turnover per game. I doubt that McHale and his staff are losing sleep over the state of offensive rebounding. Turnovers however ...

 

Bingo you nailed it.

 

Why compare opponent's OReb with our own OReb. They are totally unrelated. It's like saying that since we are a good offensive team, it doesn't matter that we are playing poor defense.

 

I am comparing the results (in points) of the Rockets offensive rebounds and their opponents offensive rebounds. And arriving at the net point differential. So while we can say that the opponents are gathering in 3.3 more offensive rebounds a game, the actual cost of that disparity is only 0.7 points per game. In other words people made a mountain out of a mole hill.

A comparable example would be " OMG! The Rockets have had 157 fewer possessions this season than their opponents!!! They are doomed!" But when the real cost of the disparity is analyzed the fewer possessions are determined to be pretty much meaningless.

 

The Rocket are missing 10 free throws a game, which leads the league by far, and create easy defensive rebounds for the opposition. I'm sure this has a lot to do with the problem.

 

You still don't get my point. We are scoring 109.9 point per game while our opponents are scoring 105.6.

By your logic, our poor defense doesn't really matter that much because we are outscoring our opponents 4.3 point per game.

The fact that we are a good offensive team does not excuse us to play defense poorly. Likewise, the fact that we can get some offensive rebounds is not an excuse to be bad at defensive rebounding. To be an elite team contending for the championship, you have to be good on both ends.

 

I am just saying that people often bark up the wrong tree. Instead of looking at defensive rebounding % or possessions, perhaps the 6 PPG the Rockets lose to the turnover battle should be the focus of conversation. Fix that and then address the marginal deficiencies. The PPG lost due to offensive rebounding is perhaps just a statistical anomaly, corrected as soon as we step out of SSS. Turnovers? That is not going away any time soon. Mountains out of molehills.

 

Athleticism has little to do with it, many times Howard will be too busy challenging a shot to go for the rebound and his teammates in the post will be doing the same or looking at the shot that they forget to boxout their opponent... TJ himself has been guilty of this...

 

If we allowed 3 fewer offensive rebounds per game we'd be up @ 78%.
In Loses our dreb% is 73.1%
In Wins our dreb% is 71.4%

As Jtr says this is probably not as big a deal as it seems.

 

Thanks. I believe that it is important to identify where actual deficiencies occur. Focusing in on a stat that overall contributes to a -0.7 PPG deficit this early in the season seems like folly to me.

 

Kind of hard to rebound when other teams are shooting a high percentage from the field.

 

most important % is currently we are winning at 56% of all games.

 

Dwight Howard relies on athleticm to get rebounds and does not box out. I have seen him give up several rebounds because he allowed his man to roam freely.

 

As of this exact moment the Rockets are winning 64.3 % of their games. Of course the MEM game is not over.

 

Last year, which is the year he's talking about, the Spurs were 12th in opponents offensive rebounds. They contested shots, gave up more offensive boards than a team of their caliber should, but it all worked out because they were also 4th in defensive rebounds.

In other words, team rebounding can improve, but we shouldn't stop contesting shots in order to improve this. Giving up offensive rebounds pays off in other ways.

 

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ bbs.CF.net rules.

 

true, this team gives up too many offensive reb each game.