Deep Dives: Blocked Shots and Rebounding

(Ed: Play around with stats enough and you’re bound to come across any number of fascinating little nuggets of information. Here at Nylon Calculus, we do our best to try and tie these discoveries to some sort of recognizable narrative. But that isn’t always possible, especially during the offseason. Still, it would be a shame to just let that work go to waste or to hold the data back to spring as a Secret Stats-based #WellActually, so from time-to-time, we will use these Deep Dives posts as data dumps. In today’s first installment, everything you ever wanted to know about what happens after a shot is blocked.)

We’ve discussed some ins and outs of the blocked shot before, especially the notion that blocked shots tend to lead to offensive rebounds. At least in 2014/15,

that proved to not be the case

. Shot blocks don’t appear to be any more or less likely to lead to offensive rebounds than do other shots, once we control for distance of the original shot. Sure, on the whole, shot blocked shots result in more offensive rebounds, but blocked shots also tend to occur on shots near to the basket, when offensive rebounding rates are at their highest anyway.[1. See here:

]. There is one notable exception. Looking just at shots at or near the rim, blocked shots end up out of bounds significantly more frequently than do regular old misses. Further, those “extra” out of bounds plays are essentially all team offensive rebounds. Or in other words, “Get that s*** out of here and into the 17th row”

So while blocked shots which are kept in bounds do tend to be directed more towards teammates, those blocks out of bounds result in the offense recovering, one way or another, 43% of blocks at the rim versus only 38% of all misses.[2. To go way down the rabbit hole, blocking a shot out of bounds is still better than the ball staying in bounds and being recovered by the offense, but we ca go round and round on this.]

In any event, having established the baseline for blocked shots and rebounding/ball recovery, the impetus for investigating in the first place was a series of questions regarding the Stifle Tower, Rudy Gobert. Rudy is a beastly Rim Protector with our without his shot blocking. But does he give some of that value back by not keeping the ball inbounds, or not directing it towards teammates? Let’s compare Gobert to the other leaders in total rejections in terms of defensive rebounds, keeping the ball in bounds, swatting it out of bounds, and overall defensive recovery of his blocks:

Gobert perhaps suffers slightly by comparison to Duncan and Ibaka, but isn’t egregiously bad in any area. Also note that Ibaka and Davis are advantaged on the above comparison by a relatively high proportion of their blocks being out on the floor where the offense is generally at a bigger disadvantage in terms of recovering shots anyway. And while Gobert’s “swat out” rate is high, there are others who did much worse last year, as shown by the comparison of players with 50 or more recovered[1. A small proportion of shot blocks end in odd situations such as jump balls or ends of quarters and have not been included in the totals for this analysis.] blocked shots. below:

Data from nyloncalculus.silk.co

Dwight Howard doesn’t not conform to certain hot-takey expectations…

One final note, on initial analysis, it appears that, especially at the rim, blocked shots are slightly more likely to lead to transition opportunities the other way than normal misses at the rim, but that’s another topic for another post.