Logo
The Ticker
7 days ago

Painful Reminders (Part I): The Celtics Drafted JaJuan Johnson Instead of Jimmy Butler

On June 23rd, 2011, Brian Robb and I stood around a high top bar table in Tommy Doyle’s in Kendall Square.  Before us lay one of the biggest mounds of buffalo chicken wings I had ever endeavor to make disappear.  These 25 cent flappers- one of the few indulgences afforded to the participants of our [...]

19
7 days ago

Chris Wilcox: 2012-13 Final Grade

There are a number of contextually-appropriate ways to craft this post. One would be to forgo words entirely, and represent Chris Wilcox’s entire season with a series of videos. That would involve one part of this: For every eight parts of this: Note the headline on that second clip. Someone was so amused/enraged by Wilcox’s [...]

12
8 days ago

Rajon Rondo’s 2012-13 Final Grade

Here’s a sweeping general statement involving super specific statistics that may or may not mean anything: In the 1423 minutes Rajon Rondo played this season, the Boston Celtics were outscored by 1.3 points per 100 possessions. When he sat (including all contests after he tore his ACL), Boston was better than their opponents by 1.8 [...]

93
9 days ago

Avery Bradley Elected to NBA All-Defense Second Team

Avery Bradley has been a standout defender for the past couple seasons…in the regular season anyway. Now he has a trophy to prove it. The NBA announced this afternoon that the third-year guard has been elected by coaches around the league to the second-team all-NBA defensive team for the first time in his career. Bradley [...]

13
12 days ago

Paul Pierce’s Contract: Dispelling The Myths and Stating The Facts

The first domino to fall this offseason is Paul Pierce’s contract. Until Danny Ainge figures out what he’s doing there, little else matters. As we wait for this decision, we also must face the rest of the offseason, which means it is also rumor season. With that time of year, comes plenty of information floating [...]

42
12 days ago

Final Grade: Avery Bradley (C+)

In his third year in the league, in which promising players often make brash leaps from benchwarmer to starter, from starter to star, Avery Bradley took a big step back. But his regression might be deceptive. When he returned to the Celtics’ lineup on January the 2nd after two in-season months recovering from offseason shoulder [...]

9
Browse Archives by:

Revisiting The Offensive Rebounding Debate

The CelticsHub staff is in Boston this weekend for the 2013 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Yesterday, Michael Pina and I discussed the results of a panel discussion and research paper called “To Crash or Not To Crash: A quantitative look at the relationship between offensive rebounding and transition defense in the NBA,” by MIT’s Jenna Wiens, Guha Balakrishnan, Joel Brooks and John Guttag.

You can read our back-and-forth in full over at True Hoop, but here’s one of the excerpts that touches on the ongoing discussion about Boston’s aversion to crashing the boards.

Pina: Just look at this: Three of the NBA’s top four defensive teams (Bulls, Pacers and Grizzlies) also rank in the top five for offensive-rebounding percentage, per NBA.com/Stats. The other defensive team is the Spurs. And where does their offensive rebounding rank? Dead last. Yikes.

DeGama: There’s an interesting bit of overlap between Chicago and Boston but it comes with wildly different results. Under Tom Thibodeau, Chicago has turned out the same kind of sexy defensive efficiencies his Boston teams did while he was working under Doc Rivers. Are we to believe Thibs has changed his perspective on offensive rebounding, that he never held the kind of antipathy toward it Rivers seems to, or are Chicago’s offensive rebounding feats just a function of his roster?

Pina: I’d be more inclined to believe it’s a function of having bears in the frontcourt. Taj Gibson, Carlos Boozer (contract be damned, the man can board), All-Star center Joakim Noah, and — not this season, but in the past two — Omer Asik are superior to Kevin Garnett and a couple hobbled co-stars. The Bulls crash the offensive glass and hold down one of the league’s best defenses. If they could only score the ball, they’d have it all.

DeGama: I think the actionable insights in this area will come when we can account for those roster differences. Speaking of which, this November 2012 quote from Rivers makes it sound like the Celtics have rock-solid proprietary metrics that speak to their specific roster: “That is a number I rarely look at, offensive rebounds. Statistically, it holds up. I can tell you, you don’t offensive rebound, you stop [the opponent's] transition, you win more games than when you get offensive rebounds. I can guarantee you that on those stats.”

You can read the entire research paper at the Sloan Sports website right here.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>