Show me a team that has a lot of offensive rebounds, and I’ll show you a bad team. This is the general rule, however, a paradox most basketball fans don’t realize: The team with more offensive rebounds in a game is likely to lose.
For example, the Houston Rockets led the NBA in offensive rebounds this year and went 20-62. Conversely, the Celtics finished 20th in the offensive boards and won 57 games. Five of the seven worst rebounding offensive teams went to the playoffs a year early; This year, three of the bottom five made it. Mighty Philly was in that group both times, believe it or not.
The correlation between turnovers and success is stronger but still lacks nearly the oomph toward winning as shooting percentages do. Toronto led the league in both forcing games and blocking games; The Raptors are at home now. Meanwhile, the Bucks were the last to force turnovers. They are among the favorites to win the tournament, along with 26th-ranked Boston.
There is a reason, of course, that the team with more offensive rebounds tends to lose. You might think it’s mainly a result of menu choices; Perhaps such teams lead the league in this category only because they rely on dinosaur centers or have to make do with playing Energizer wings who can’t actually shoot.
This may be a minor contributor, but the main reason for it is much simpler math: you can’t bounce a shot until you miss it, and even the best rebounding teams see that about two-thirds of their fouls end up in the team’s hands. Discount. Missed shots are a sucker bet, and offensive rebounds are an indication that you’re losing.
Generally speaking, then, “volume” basketball has taken a back seat to basketball’s “win-or-miss” percentage, and that difference becomes more acute in the postseason. The two teams that dominated the possession game in 2021-22, Memphis and Toronto, combined to win eight playoff games; The two teams with the largest difference in effective field goal percentage went to the NBA Finals. (Golden State Plus 4.3 and Boston Plus 4.0). There’s a reason the “Make-or-Miss league” is so popular.
So, the surprise of the 2023 playoffs so far, at least to this observer, is how important the possession game has been to many of the first-round standouts… so much so that it has trumped the “fault or miss” rule several times already.
Look no further than Golden State, for example, which has the third-best field goal percentage differential in the league this year, 3.1 points better than its opponents. Only Milwaukee and Boston did better, and they beat him in the East.
Sadly, the Warriors are also 29th in turnover this season, and in their Game 2 loss to Sacramento in particular, their visceral inability to throw a pass to their jersey-wearing teammate was massive. Of the Warriors’ 20 turnovers, 12 of them were bad passes. Some were autopilot passes to positions or players that weren’t open… and some weren’t even close, bringing back horrible memories of JT O’Sullivan for Bay Area sports fans.
Jordan Paul with the worst pass in the playoffs pic.twitter.com/ecll8VvZkT
– Kevin O’Connor (KevinOConnorNBA) April 18, 2023
It started on the first play of the game, when a harmlessly deflected Draymond Green pass fell to Kevin Huerter, and it quickly deteriorated from there:
You might think the Warriors are the ones at fault, but all of the bad passes were from the best seven players. No one was immune. Steve Curry raised the pass twice in high hands when facing half-tight traps. Gary Payton II bounced an inbound pass directly to Harrison Barnes. A rare short roll from Kevon Looney turned a pass into triple coverage.
Not only were these errors the juice of the Sacramento transition game, making up for what was in fact some clunky Kings half-court offense, but they were also the biggest contributor to the Warriors’ destruction in the possession game. And considering they’re the defending champions and the lovable underdog Kings, that’s the story of the playoffs so far.
Consider, for a moment, the data:
- The Warriors shoot 64.6 percent in 2 seconds, the best mark ever for any team in the playoffs.
- They shot 3 times more often and more accurately than the kings.
- The 5.3+ point effective field goal percentage margin over two games is actually better than the best mark in the league a year ago.
- They are down 0-2 in this series.
(*Scratch sound recordings*) … What???
it’s the truth. The Kings were severely outmatched by the Warriors and lost twice anyway. Between offensive rebounds and turnovers, the Warriors give up an amazing command 10 possession Each game has an advantage for Sacramento, and the result means that a team with a true shooting percentage mark of 59.7 loses to a team with a mark of 55.3.
It is usually a game of possession never Impressive enough to make up for that much variance in shot making. Last year, for example, the Warriors’ true shooting percentage margin of 3.3 points in their second round win over Memphis was more than enough to make up an astounding 42 turnover deficit over six games.
But in these extreme cases, the possession game says, shooting be damned. And with Golden State facing Game 3 without Green after Christian Laettner stomped his chest on Domantas Sabonis, the onslaught of turnovers in Game 2 in particular could be the beginning of the end for the champions. Even if Green’s absence results in less adventurous passing on the offensive end, it might have been better for Sabonis to eat away at the offensive glass, as the Kings already had the advantage in their first two games.
(Side note: Sabonis measures 6-foot-10 in shoes In the 2015 Nike Basketball Academy and was listed 6-11 as a junior in Oklahoma City, when teams were happily amplifying heights with the extra inch boost the shoes provided. The Kings now score it at 7-1. This can’t be real, right? How did this happen? We need a full investigative article on this conundrum.)
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The Warriors’ awful departure is the story of the playoffs so far for me, but it’s doubly amazing that Golden State-Sacramento isn’t the only series where this is happening. For example, the first two games between New York and Cleveland were told almost entirely by the measure of possession.
The Knicks’ Game 1 victory came despite New York shooting worse than Cleveland on both 2 and 3. The Knicks made up for it with 17 offensive boards and a seven-plus possession advantage overall.
In Game 2, the possessions were equal on paper, but in reality, the Knicks’ turnovers were the entire story. Cleveland had 19 points off turnover in the second quarter; Just a few late cosmetic scoring made both the scoreboard and possession board look tidy.
For the series, the Knicks recovered 33.7 percent of their errors, a number that would have led the league by a wide margin in the regular season, and so far, that’s the only thing keeping them afloat despite an effective 9.8-point field goal. disability percentage.
A similar tale told itself in the Clippers–Suns series, where the Suns evened Game 2 by relying on superior shot making and an even possession battle after being dominated by LA in this arena in the opener. The Clippers plus-9 advantage in offensive rebounding in that game included an amazing 51-second possession late in the fourth quarter that helped seal the win, which was the basketball equivalent of handing it off to Jerome Bettis three times and exploiting the clock.
Through two games, the Suns’ amazing 8.1-point margin in effective field goal percentage is certainly a great omen…but the series is tied 1-1 because they only rebound 44.8% of the missed shots available.
Even in a series that you might think of as one-sided and not interesting, the property was a huge story. Philadelphia has been a rebounding offensive team in the last five seasons in each of the past two seasons but not against the Nets in the first round.
The Sixers have smashed Brooklyn on the glass in their first two games, catching 31.8 percent of missed shots while allowing the Nets to gain just 13.0 percent, and that tilted the advantage in a series in which shootings and turnovers were roughly equal. Philly’s nine-game advantage in their first two games is entirely down to rebounding, and overall, they’re almost as good as the Kings.
And it all began, of course, in the Play-In tournament, where Atlanta shot 10 of 41 of 3 and missed 11 free throws but edged out the seventh-seeded Heat by hitting them to the glass with a massive 22-6 advantage. in offensive rebounds. Likewise, the Lakers were poorly edged by Minnesota (53.0 effective field goal percentage to 46.7) but missed out on the seventh seed thanks to a disadvantage of eight possessions on the glass.
So we’ll close where we started: The Falcons are the rule, not the exception, in their series against Boston. Atlanta wins both the offensive recovery and personnel turnover battles by a healthy margin. Sadly, the 13.8-point difference in effective field goal percentage is a bit of an issue and explains why the Celtics were able to pull off a two-time victory.
Again, this is usually the case, that superior shot wins the day. The story of the first round so far is how often that hasn’t been the case, and whether those exceptions will continue to add up to form a “trend” or if this is just a fun little sample-sized theatre.
(Photo by Domantas Sabonis: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)