Nylon Notebook: Detroit Pistons and Andre Drummond’s rebounds
By Ian Levy
Andre Drummond is having himself a season on the glass. He currently leads the league in both offensive and defensive rebounds and is on pace for roughly 1341 total rebounds, which would be the highest raw rebounding total since Dennis Rodman’s 1367 in 1993-94. Even more impressive is the gap between Drummond this season and the runner-up, DeAndre Jordan (who beat out Drummond for the most total rebounds in the league the last two seasons). With 458 total rebounds[1. Through games of 12/20/15.], Drummond currently has 123% of Jordan’s total. That margin would be the sixth-highest in league history if it held for the rest of the season.
In terms of raw rebounding numbers, Rodman is still quite the presence. He led the league in total rebounds four times and in those seasons combined he had 118% of the combined rebounding totals of the second-place finishers.
Brandon Jennings
It looks like Brandon Jennings will be back in the lineup for Detroit on Tuesday, for the first time since tearing his Achilles nearly a year ago. Jennings is not a savior but he’s almost certainly an improvement over Steve Blake and should help bring some life to the second-unit offense. The other thing he’ll likely be bringing is plenty of three-point attempts. Jennings is nothing if not an outside gunner.
While the Pistons could certainly use some three-point shooting, they’re tied for ninth in attempts per game but tie for 25th in three-point percentage, Jennings may not be the answer. One of the issues for Detroit’s shooting has been their split between catch-and-shoot and pull-up three-pointers. As a team, they’re attempting about 2.7 catch-and-shoot threes for every pull-up, one of the lowest ratios in the league. They’re also shooting just 29.3 percent on those pull-up threes so far this season. If anything, Jennings will likely make that problem worse. Although he has made 34.4 percent of his pull-up threes over the past two seasons, he’s attempted 8.2 per 48 minutes, singlehandedly outpacing Detroit’s team average of 6.8 this season.
Jennings is not going to be playing 48 minutes, at least not if the Pistons have playoff aspirations. But even in small minutes running the second unit offense, he’s likely to have plenty of opportunities to fire it up off the dribble which probably isn’t going to help Detroit’s efficiency much.
The rest of the mess
The Pistons rely heavily on the three-point shooting of their wings for spacing around the deadly Drummond-Reggie Jackson pick-and-roll combination. What they’ve gotten so far has been something of a mixed bag. Ersan Ilyasova is shooting a healthy 37.3 percent but Marcus Morris and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope are at 34.0 and 30.1 percent respectively. Reggie Jackson is at 35.0 percent. Those percentages, Caldwell-Pope and Morris in particular, are limiting to the Pistons offense and intentions for this year.
Neither has been a phenomenally good outside shooter in their career to this point, but both are at career-lows[2. Not counting Morris’ rookie season when he had just 17 attempts.] Using the tools and analysis from Nick Neuteufel’s guest post last Friday, we can see how outlier-ish these performances look and whether some positive regression to the mean might be coming.
In the graphs below, blue represents pull-up three-point percentage, orange represents catch-and-shoot. The important things to pay attention to here are the curves. The solid line curves represent our assumptions about each player’s three-point shooting before this season began. The dashed line represents our new best guess, incorporating the information from this season.
Ilyasova and Jackson’s curves have stayed fairly similar although both players look like slightly better pull-up three-point shooters this season than we previously thought. Perhaps some regression might be coming there. Morris has been far worse on pull-up attempts which explains a lot of his overall slide. Caldwell-Pope on the other hands has been dramatically worse on catch-and-shoot attempts. Limiting pull-ups for Morris, Jackson and Ilyasova would probably go a long way towards increasing team and individual efficiency. Caldwell-Pope, now a career 33.1 percent three-point shooter on 762 career attempts, may be a lost cause.