NCAA teams are choosing transition defense over offensive rebounding
Tom Izzo was fairly succinct in his post-game comments describing the underlying causes behind Michigan State’s second round loss to Kansas in the first weekend of the 2017 NCAA tournament: “I thought it looked like some men were taking care of some boys.”
On paper, the Spartans struggled on the offensive glass, grabbing a woeful 15 percent of their misses, which seems strange as hitting the glass hard is a hallmark of any Izzo-coached team — the Spartans certainly don’t shy away from rebounding in practice, and the drill ‘War’ has become synonymous with the Big Ten coach — but this season’s group was different. MSU only grabbed 29.2 percent of its overall misses, the lowest ever for Izzo’s squad in the Ken Pomeroy era (since 2001-02).
It wasn’t that MSU didn’t have the heart of past year’s, though; Izzo — in both the Kansas contest and season-long — was more worried about his team’s transition defense than converting errant caroms. Per Hoop-Math.com, the Spartans’ transition effective field goal percentage ranked seventh nationally (46.3 percent). Going into this season, Izzo likely knew that his raw squad—third youngest in the Big Ten — would need all the defensive help it could muster, and the easiest way to keep points off the board is by not allowing opportunities on the fast break.
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But what’s most interesting about Izzo’s shift is that he is following a trend within college basketball. Pomeroy has tracked Division I’s average offensive rebounding percentage, and the rate has significantly dipped throughout the past decade-plus, falling from 35.9 percent in 2002 to 29.2 percent this season. This year isn’t the all-time low — teams collected just 29 percent last season — but it’s very telling that the two most offensive board-lite seasons have occurred consecutively.
This strategic change is also very apparent parsing through Synergy Sports’ data. Tracking the top 20 teams through both the percentage of plays allotted to offensive rebounds as well as the overall number of plays involving an offensive rebound, from 2012 to the present — the percent change the past five seasons is more than a five percent decline. Clearly teams are shying away from second chances, and coaches are committing themselves to an increasing emphasis on transition defense.
This tweak didn’t happen overnight, and isn’t a wholesale change. There are certain squads that have always emphasized open court defense over offensive rebounds: even with Allen Edwards as head coach, Wyoming continued to abstain from pursuing its misses (22.6 percent), a holdover from the five years Larry Shyatt coached at the Mountain West school. And Tony Bennett’s Virginia squads don’t chase down errant shots, and have ranked within Hoop-Math.com’s top fifty of transition effective field goal percentage for the past six seasons.
Similarly, teams that famously feast on additional possessions aren’t backing off their tried and true methods. West Virginia is one of the few DI squads that can both crash the glass (37.9 percent) and defend on the break (.848 points per transition play, which Synergy ranks as fourth-stingiest in college hoops this season).
But just like the growth of pick-and-roll and proliferation of 3-point-laden offenses, the seeds of this change started in the NBA. As ESPN’s Zach Lowe noted in 2016, NBA teams have all but abandoned the offensive glass in the hopes of eliminating fast break buckets. Starting with (of course) the San Antonio Spurs, teams are concerned more than ever before with leak outs. According to then-Toronto Raptors forward Luis Scola, “Years ago, every coach was looking for offensive rebounds. And now it’s so different, because coaches don’t want to give up transition points. That’s why players stopped doing it.”
Another factor is a change within the college game itself. Though the shot clock was lowered to 30 seconds for the 2016 season (and beyond), the number of possessions a DI team uses has remained stagnant — about 68 possessions in 2017, which is just one possession fewer than the average in 2002 (per Pomeroy) — but that five second drop does mean more opportunities for open court attempts. The best way to prevent those lay-ups in open space? Get back on defense as quickly as possible, offensive rebounds be damned.
This also allows college coaches more control over a game where that sort of hand-wringing is accepted more than in the NBA. Marshall coach Dan D’Antoni told me the genius of his offensive strategy was largely due to how little he coached when the ball tipped: “I think our offense, and our coaching style, gives them a freedom to play the game and use their own smarts to create things, instead of a coach trying to create everything for them.” But there are few that coach like D’Antoni, who spent years absorbing the ins and outs of motivating NBA athletes while working as an assistant with his brother Mike.
Perhaps the most significant reason for this shift is also the most elementary: it is hard to teach players to do both things well. Of the 350-plus teams in DI, very few are skilled at ferociously pursuing misses and then just as tenaciously getting back on defense. When Josh Pastner arrived at Georgia Tech, his teams at Memphis had consistently ranked within the top 100 of KenPom’s offensive rebound percentage rankings. But facing a massive rebuild with a team picked to finish in the ACC’s cellar, Pastner fully embraced transition defense, and his squad, which recently lost to TCU in the NIT finals, led the ACC in transition points per play (.849, per Synergy).
The Final Four should provide a fascinating case study in this offensive rebound devolution. A petri dish that illustrates how college teams approach these two anchors of the game. Gonzaga is one of the nation’s best at preventing quick buckets (.92 points per fast break play, which ranks 30th in DI) while rarely chasing caroms (33 offensive rebound percentage in the NCAA tournament, which is a shade above the team’s rate in 2017). Oregon appears to do both well, but it is misleading — Jordan Bell is so good at crashing the glass (12.4 offensive rebound percentage) that the rest of the team can fall back — whereas North Carolina, the nation’s most persistent team, grabbing 42 percent of its misses, is woefully inadequate preventing transition buckets (1.13 points per play, per Synergy, which is up from the team’s 2016 rate of 1.006).
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Not all that surprisingly, South Carolina is one of the few squads well-versed in both areas, and it’s a reason why the Gamecocks shouldn’t be quickly discounted as Final Four interlopers. Frank Martin’s team is one of only three to rank within Synergy’s top 20 of transition defense (.892 points per play) and KenPom’s top 40 for offensive rebounding rate. This shift will only continue to widen, and it could be sooner rather than later that we begin to fully eulogize offensive boards.