James catches, puts up a three, won’t go. Rebound Bosh, back out to Allen. His three-pointer – BAAANG! Tied game with five seconds remaining.
One of the most memorable sequences in recent NBA history sprung from a rare, but unbelievably costly mistake by Gregg Popovich. In an attempt to retain defensive flexibility and prevent a potential three-point make by the Heat, he decided to leave Tim Duncan, the Spurs’ leading rebounder for 16 straight seasons, on the bench in favor of a smaller lineup.
The Spurs did a pretty good job of closing out on LeBron James, forcing him to miss his shot, but Duncan’s absence opened up a world of opportunity for Chris Bosh who dominantly secured the offensive rebound. While Ray Allen deservedly received the majority of praise for making one of the most clutch shots in NBA history, it was Bosh’s positioning and focus in the crucial moment of his career that forced the arena staff to “get those motherf*****g ropes outta there”.
Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals was a prime example of the impact a well-timed offensive rebound can have not only on the outcome of a single game of basketball, but on the epilogue of an entire NBA season.
In its essence, the offensive board yields an important competitive advantage similar to a steal; it provides an extra opportunity to score, ultimately putting a team in a better position to win.
Despite its undeniable benefits, NBA coaches have slowly but steadily continued to abandon the offensive rebound as a tool of improving their respective teams’ chances of winning. That trend is, surprisingly, consistently observable since the very inception of the NBA.
With the number of field goal attempts consistently on the rise over the past 20 seasons, the number of total rebounds has consequently increased as well. However, contrary to statistical expectations, the volume of offensive rebounds is on a persistent decline. The 2017-18 season now marks the first time the league as a whole averaged fewer than 10 offensive rebounds per game.
Pinpointing the single exact cause for that phenomenon is virtually an impossible task given the range of different philosophies and approaches across the league. The evolution of the game in general, however, provides some interesting points of analysis as to why the offensive rebound is becoming a lost art in the NBA.
Preventing fast-break points
This season, the pace factor has hit its highest mark since way back in 1990-91. Teams are increasingly searching for opportunities to quickly run down the floor, often settling for shots early in the shot-clock in favor of playing against set defenses.
In such a system, sacrificing a player to chase after an offensive rebound can be quite counterproductive. While directing your big man to fight for the loose ball could have the benefit of slowing down the initiation of the attack or gaining a second-chance opportunity as the desired end-result, it also incurs a considerable risk of generating a 5-on-4 situation the opposing players can effectively solve.
That is especially true when the misplaced player is a member of the frontcourt responsible for anchoring the defense.
Defending against modern NBA offenses, even in 5-on-5 situations, is already as tough as it gets. It is therefore understandable why the coaches want their lineups in the best possible shape to make a good collective defensive play.
Forcing players to purposefully go after offensive boards is simply not in line with those aspirations. After all, fast break chances have a significantly higher conversion rate than second-chance opportunities, making a failed attempt at an offensive rebound a net negative decision.
Evolution of big men
Among 51 qualified centers and forwards who averaged at least five field goal attempts per game, 70 percent recorded 10 or more 3-point attempts this season. Rewinding back to the 2007-08 season, that number dips to just 9 out of 44 eligible players, i.e. ~20 percent with a neglectable number of attempts from beyond the arc.
That is just one among plenty of indicators of one of the most prominent trends in modern basketball – the paradigm shift from traditional, heavy low post centers towards agile big men with a soft touch.
With the growing popularity of the pace-and-space system across the NBA, competent shooting with an extended range rose to the top of the list of prerequisites for becoming a successful, or even a playable big man.
The role of “old-school” centers and power forwards generally revolved around fighting for position on the low block and playing with the back towards the basket once the inward pass has been made. Today, seeing a player spend an extended amount of time in the low post in a non-mismatch situation truly is a rare sight.
The prototypical big man of the new era constantly moves, sets screens and pops to the three-point line as a triple threat, or simply roams the perimeter, opening up space for slashing guards, prepared to shoot the ball the moment the defense collapses to protect the rim. Under those circumstances, securing a position in the painted area quickly started moving towards the low-end of the list of priorities.
The effect the reinvention of the role of a big man has on the presence on the offensive glass is pretty obvious. As the average distance from the rim increases, so does the probability of getting a second scoring opportunity by the virtue of an offensive board.
Also, considering the new trends, getting into a realistic position to secure the offensive rebound became a matter of feasibility.
While big men of the past already were in a solid position to grab loose balls at any given time, today’s big men, who are further away from the basket, would have to put in effort to achieve respectable odds of getting away with the offensive board. Wasting copious amounts of energy to get into a high-risk situation that doesn’t even guarantee a positive outcome simply doesn’t make a lot of sense in this era, and the numbers show that the coaches have recognized that issue.
Unpredictability of bounce trajectories
Dennis Rodman, arguably the greatest rebounder of all time, is famous for stating that his rebounding prowess doesn’t stem solely from his instincts, but rather from hours upon hours of studying the tape of his teammates shooting the ball.
While that claim might seem ridiculous, but actually believable since it’s Rodman we’re talking about, the real question is whether such an approach would be viable in today’s basketball.
It’s one thing having Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen continuously shooting from mid-range or in the paint, and another when you have a range of teammates ready to shoot from virtually any spot in the half-court. Not to take away from Rodman’s impeccable positioning and mind-boggling rebounding records, but with the average shot distance increasing by several feet and the number of three-point field goal attempts almost tripling since his era, he would now almost certainly have problems with utilizing his approach.
Again, it all boils down to preservation of energy with regard to the value of chasing the offensive rebound. While it might be a smart decision to have a designated guy near the rim when the majority of the shots are either layups, shots from the post or mid-range jumpers, the benefits of such an approach slowly start melting away when your plan of attack relies on dropping bombs from the three-point line or well beyond it.
Simply going by the law of physics, longer shots result in longer, more unpredictable trajectories. That means that nowadays, the probability of finding an optimal position for an offensive rebound suffers a significant drop.
Moreover, that puts the defensive teams into a better situation, since covering more space by outnumbering the opposition becomes much more valuable than individually getting into an ideal position to secure the rebound. With that in mind, abandoning the idea of chasing offensive rebounds in favor of various other benefits becomes a completely rational decision.
Lack of correlation with winning
Here is where the past ten NBA Champions ranked in terms of offensive rebounds over the course of the regular season:
With the exception of the Lakers, who were specific in many other ways with their Kobe-centric gameplan, and the 2015-16 Cavs to a certain extent, excelling in the offensive rebounding department hasn’t correlated with winning at all. Among the 10 last teams that reached the finish line first, seven closed out the season in the bottom third in terms of offensive rebounds.
In the age of analytics, that presents a huge red flag. Investing time and effort into an aspect of the game that doesn’t yield any observable positive results quickly gets crossed out from coaches notebooks, and consequently from players’ minds and tendencies.
It’s simple logic; why insist on a facet of the game that historically fails to provide a competitive advantage over the rest of the league, when you can put more focus on elements that actually increase your chances of winning.
Of course, that doesn’t mean teams will shy away from cashing in on a second chance opportunity when it presents itself; it just means they won’t be getting out of their way to reach it. While offensive rebounding once mostly relied on a combination of skill and chance, today it depends on making smart, calculated decisions as well.
In a broader sense, the presence on the offensive glass has become a direct casualty of the progression of basketball. While a single offensive rebound can have an enormous impact on a game, as evidenced by the Miami Heat’s miraculous comeback in 2013, focusing on that aspect of the game simply doesn’t bode well in the modern NBA.
Virtually all factors that have become the point of emphasis in the recent years strongly go against the notion of chasing after offensive rebounds. With fast-moving offenses and the reciprocal defensive response, big men blending with the positionless basketball model rather than roaming the paint, and the “3 > 2”concept that makes optimal offensive positioning following a missed shot more strenuous than ever, the offensive rebound has become the high risk, low reward part of the game everyone wants to avoid.
Since those tendencies are not limited to an exclusive set of teams anymore, but are, more or less successfully, becoming implemented in all systems across the league, the trend of offensive rebounding becoming a lost art in the NBA will more than likely continue for the foreseeable future.
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