Nylon Calculus: Charlotte Hornets are rebounding by committee
By Nick Sciria
When discussing team rebounding, coaches throw around phrases like “gang rebounding” and “all five on the boards.” Those lines beg the question about whether or not a collective rebounding effort can be successful or if one standout rebounder is actually necessary in clearing the defensive glass.
To distinguish the difference between these two concepts, for this comparison I will use the variance among the defensive rebound percentages of the ten players with the most minutes played on each team. Teams that have one rebounder with a really high defensive rebound percentage (Andre Drummond and the Detroit Pistons for example), will have a high variance. On the other hand, teams where defensive rebounds are spread around the roster and there is not standout defensive rebounder percentage will have a lower variance.
From the abundance of teams in the lower left quadrant of the table above, it’s clear that most teams that spread out their defensive rebounds have struggled on the defensive glass this season. However, there are two teams that go against this trend. The Charlotte Hornets (No. 2 in defensive rebound percentage) and the Denver Nuggets (No. 3 in defensive rebound percentage) have both succeeded on the defensive glass without a player who collects an abnormal amount of defensive boards compared to his teammates.
The Hornets are an interesting case. Charlotte’s three main rotational bigs (Cody Zeller, Marvin Williams and Frank Kaminsky) all have defensive rebounding percentages lower than 18.0 percent, but a focused effort on collective rebounding has made all of the difference. Nicolas Batum, Jeremy Lamb and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist are examples of wings who boast an impressive knack for rebounding the ball. According to my percentile tables, the median defensive rebound percentage for a wing player was about 12.0 percent in the 2015-16 NBA season, a mark that Batum, Lamb and Kidd-Gilchrist all exceed by a significant margin.
Of course, the Hornets’ transition offense takes a hit because of this, as their wings are often stuck under the basket instead of being able to get a head start in transition. Unsurprisingly, Charlotte currently ranks 28th in the percentage of their offensive possessions that come in transition.
The Nuggets are the other unusual case in this study, although Denver achieves success in a different way. Denver’s wings are not the rebound collectors that Charlotte’s wing players are. Although Wilson Chandler collects 19.0 percent of available rebounds, Gary Harris, Will Barton and Danillo Gallinari hover around average to below average in terms of their defensive rebound percentage for their position. For Denver, their defensive rebounding variance revolves around their three-headed monster in the frontcourt. Kenneth Faried, Nikola Jokic and Jusuf Nurkic all currently grab at least 23.0 percent of the available defensive rebounds when they are on the court, above-average marks for NBA big men.
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Ultimately, Denver and Charlotte have succeeded in going against the grain in terms of defensive rebound variance this season. However, it is clear from the chart above that this type of defensive rebounding appears to be an outlier rather than a trend in the league.
Source: Basketball-Reference, NBA.com/Stats