Andre Drummond is creating his own shot

Shot creation is an essential skill for any offense. Some teams, like the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs, rely on player and ball movement to create those openings. Others, like the Los Angeles Clippers and Cleveland Cavaliers, lean on the individual brilliance of their stars to manifest efficiency. Whatever the dominant formula, there are situations in every game where a defense forces an offense to rely on a single player to get them a basket.

Andre Drummond has been doing some work on the offensive glass. His current 17.4 offensive rebound percentage would place him right on the edge of the 20 greatest offensive rebounding seasons of all time, a plateau he’s reached both of the last two seasons. He also looks phenomenal by Seth Partnow’s detailed rebounding statistics — one of the most active (Offensive Rebound Chase Percentage) and successful (Offensive Rebound Win Percentage) bigs in the league on the offensive glass. What’s really been important for the Detroit Pistons is the degree to which those offensive rebounds have been converted into points. By the NBA’s play type statistics, Drummond is shooting 68.8 percent on put-backs and nearly a third of all of his shot attempts have been in this category.

Usually when we discuss created shots we’re focusing on three scenarios delineated by the NBA’s play type statistics — isolations, post-ups, and possessions used by the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll. Those types of possessions fit together because they share two key characteristics. The first is that the player who uses the possession is theoretically responsible for getting themselves into scoring position. The second is that, if a team isn’t too hung up on quality, they could theoretically get one of those possessions anytime they want. In general, putbacks don’t fit in this group because the shot creation aspect happens by virtue of catching the ball in the immediate vicinity of the basket and their frequency is limited by context, a team can’t just go get an offensive rebound and a putback anytime they want.

However, in the case of Drummond, I wonder if it’s worth considering his putback attempts in the category of self-created shots. The graph below uses play type data from NBA.com and shows all players who have used at least 25 possessions on either isolations, post-ups, putbacks or as the ball-handler in a pick-and-roll.

Drummond is attempting nearly five putbacks per game. He has roughly as many putback possessions this season as LeBron James has isolations, Greg Monroe has post-ups, or Gordon Hayward has as the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll. Obviously, his scoring efficiency on those possessions is dramatically higher. It is the frequency here that really makes his case — only three players have more isolations than Drummond has putbacks. Only eight have more post-ups. His putback total through 10 games would have ranked 89th across all of last season.

I’m mostly just having some fun with labels here, arguing about the elasticity of definitions. But the numbers tell a fairly straightforward story — Drummond is uniquely talented at getting himself into scoring position on the offensive glass and the frequency at which he’s doing it compares favorably to the way other teams lean on stars to create shots with the ball in their hand. When an opposing defense tightens up around the Detroit Pistons, their most efficient option is often just to get a shot up and let Drummond do what he does best.