re: Which team has a brighter future, Celtics or Timberwolves?

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The other day, I tweeted out this chart talking about the league leaders in offensive rebound “chase percentage” through the All-Star Break

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This is meant to represent how often a player “crashes the offensive glass.” That’s all it is! We know some guys — some teams — crash the offensive boards more than others; this is just a number for that. It’s capturing what has happened in the game in a more exact manner and answering the question, “Who’s really attacking the offensive glass?”

And it’s interesting for a few reasons. Offensive rebounds are good. They get a team extra possession and often easy baskets off of tip-ins or put-backs. On the other hand, being too aggressive in pursuing offensive rebounds is bad, because it allows the opposition to fast break more and get their own easy baskets. So in addition to the number of offensive rebounds a player secures, it’s nice to know how many they go after as a means of comparison, and, by extension, how many times they’re playing that risk/reward of offensive rebound vs. a potential break the other way. It’s the same question asked by teams that eschew offensive rebounds to prevent transition opportunities.

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One of the data points is “rebound chances.” This sounds promising, but what does it mean?

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There’s a lot more there than displayed on NBA.com. Including offensive rebound chances! So we know how many offensive rebound chances each player gets per game by the above definition. Now all we need to determine the percentage of his team’s misses is the number of those misses while he’s on the floor. And here, we’re in luck! Among the first wave of “advanced” stats for the NBA was rebound percentage, which is split into both offensive and defensive rebound percentage, so the number we need is right there on NBA.com

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Since offensive rebound percentage is offensive rebounds / total available offensive rebounds, and we know both the number of rebounds collected and the percentage, we can simply flip the equation and find Available OReb = Orebs/Oreb%. This number of available offensive rebounds then becomes the denominator in determining a player’s “Chase %.” While the above process is slightly convoluted and more than a little laborious15, there is nothing that requires any math past about 10th grade level. And if you’re unfamiliar with those concepts, that’s okay; that’s why nerds exist, and we know that you know that we know how to do math. You can trust us on that part. The more important part was asking the right question and identifying the sources for the data which could provide an answer if not the solution for examining players’ relative propensity to crash the offensive glass. It is also a demonstration of the power of combining multiple data sources to best address the issue. The math is unimportant; it’s about the right basketball questions and using the right tools — among those we have available.

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