Thursday, September 17, 2015

Offensive rebounding

Every basketball scheme has its strengths and its weaknesses. What you gain on one hand you likely give up on the other. For instance, Princeton offense teams routinely get hammered on the boards. They are tough to defend, but their precise offensive scheme and emphasis on 3-point shooting draws players away from the spot where they might be in another scheme.

How does offensive rebounding fit into Coach Beard's motion offense scheme? I am not enough of an X's and O's man to know. All I can do is look at the stats and draw some conclusions.

Last year, Steve Shields' Trojans averaged 10.6 offensive rebounds per game. Beard's Angelo State team averaged 11.0 (as did his 2013-2014 team, interestingly), and they had a plus-6 margin over the opposition. So far, so good; they did rebound well. However, last year's Little Rock team was pretty poor on defense overall, allowing opponents to shoot 44.4% overall, while Angelo only allowed a stingy 39.3%, so there were more offensive rebounds for them to get.

I am not sure what this stat means particularly, but it is interesting. Last year 31.0% of Little Rock's rebounds were on the offensive end, while only 28.8% of Angelo's were. (For comparison, 30.9% of Arkansas State's board were offensive, UCA 30.2%, SLU 29.6%.) All of this might seem to indicate that while Beard's teams hit the boards pretty well overall, their rebounding is weighted heavily on the defensive end. Maybe the nature of the motion offense tends to limit offensive rebounding somewhat? Just a guess.

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