Bismack Biyombo grabs all the rebounds
By Ian Levy
The Toronto Raptors center had a big Game 3 performance against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Here’s a look at how Bismack Biyombo’s performance rates amongst others this season.
At the end of last week, it looked like the Toronto Raptors were finished, sitting in an 0-2 hole to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Then, they came out and took Game 3 from the Cavaliers, highlighted by a monstrous rebounding performance by Bismack Biyombo. His 26 rebounds in Game 3 were a career-high, a new franchise record, and the most by any player in a playoff game going back to 1984. It was, in short, a dominating performance.
There are several elements to a player securing a rebound and together these describe the challenges of securing 26 rebounds in a modern NBA game. The first is that a player needs to be on the court long enough and in the vicinity of enough missed shots. Player tracking statistics at NBA.com label these as rebound chance — any time a player is within 3.5 feet (roughly an arm’s length) of a missed shot attempt.
In Game 3, Biyombo had 34 rebound chances, only the 13th time this season that a player has accumulated that many rebound chances in a single game. To put that in context, Biyombo averaged about 14.2 rebound chances per game in the regular season, and has bumped that up to 16.0 with increased minutes in the playoffs. During the regular season, Andre Drummond of the Detroit Pistons led the league in rebound chances per game at 22.2.
Getting 34 rebound chances includes some measure of luck — sometimes the ball bounces towards you, sometimes it doesn’t. Still, the sheer volume of Biyombo’s chances go well beyond a fluke and reflects how hard he was chasing the ball and working to secure positioning.
The other element of a rebound is actually winning the battle and wresting the ball from everyone else who is fighting for it. Some rebounds are, by nature, uncontested with no one else close enough to challenge for it. Only about 46.2 percent of Biyombo’s rebounds were contested in Game 3, which sounds low. However, only a dozen or so rotation players during the regular season had a higher percentage of their rebounds contested. For reference, Drummond was only contested on about 43.3 percent of his league-leading 14.8 rebounds per game.
Another way to look at this is by rebound conversion percentage — the percentage of rebound chances on which a player actually comes away with the rebound. Converting 34 chances into 26 rebounds gave Biyombo a conversion percentage of 76.5 percent for the game — a number which would have led the league during the regular season by a healthy margin. Biyombo’s rebound conversion percentage was about 56.3 percent during the regular season, and 58.0 percent here in the playoffs.
If we graph every game by every player during the regular season and playoffs (12,767 data points), plotting each performance by the total number of rebound chances and the rebound conversion percentage, we can see just how big an outlier Biyombo’s Game 3 was.
The darker the dot is, the more frequently that combination of chances and conversion happened during the season. Biyombo’s performance in Game 3 is in rare territory indeed.
Judging single-game rebounding totals in a historic context has become murkier, as the roles of big man have changed, the size advantages of giants like Chamberlain and Russell has been mitigated, and as the pace of play has evolved. However, simply comparing what Biyombo did in Game 3 to every other rebounding performance this season shows the enormity of what he did for the Raptors with their backs against the wall.
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