<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Care to guess who's having one of the best rebounding seasons in history? Your first instinct might be to say Kevin Garnett, who's running away with the rebounding title. He's averaging 13.7 boards a game, which is nearly two more than his closest competitor. Considering his sizable lead, it seems heretical to suggest somebody else is the league's best rebounder. But it's true. Though hardly a household name, the Seattle SuperSonics' Reggie Evans is putting Garnett to shame with his rebounding exploits. How did I arrive at this conclusion? It all starts with a simple premise: A player can't get a rebound unless somebody misses a shot. Following from that logic, the best way to rate rebounders is by the percentage of missed shots they reel in, not by the amount they pull down per game or even per minute. </div> Source You guys probably knew this already.
Sup[ersonic.com's Kevin Pelton has used this stat more than once to illustrate just how effective a rebounder Reggie is. It's all about how many rebounds are available to grab, not how many a player grabs per games, and when you go by that, Reggie's generally a fair way in front. He'll get a lot of interest in the offseason methinks, from a team wanting some cheap rebounding and hustle. Will we match anything with Nick around?
Here are some further numbers to provide perspective on how good these rebounding numbers are. The top 50 rebounding seasons by a player since 1978 (minimum 1000 minutes): 1978-2004 The top rebounders this season (Evans and Fortson are ranked 1 and 3, respectively): Top Rebounders this season Evans is having the rebounding season by any player not named Rodman since 1978. For those wondering what sort of rebounding rates mythic figures of the past (like Chamberlain and Russell) might have had, there unfortunately isn't enough data to calculate rebounding rates. But we can still make a rough approximation. Consider Chamberlain's first season in which he averaged 27 rebounds per game and 27.9 rebounds per 48 minutes played. Some people would look at that number and just assume that he must have been the greatest rebounder ever. But they don't take into account the large numbers of shots taken and missed back in those days. As a team, Wilt's team (Philadelphia Warriors) averaged 72.1 rebounds a game. The league's (which had 8 teams) average was 67.2 rebounds a game. Let's be conservative and assume that Philadelphia's opponents only average 60 rebounds a game. So, per game (48 minutes), there were 132 rebounds a game to be had, and Wilt grabbed 27.9 rebounds per 48 minutes, or 21.13% of the total. Again, this is an approximation, but there's very good probability that Wilt didn't rebound at nearly as high a rate as Rodman throughout the 90s or even Reggie Evans this year. 21.13% is VERY good, but certainly not record-breaking. It's good enough to be among the top 3 rebounders in the game today. By the same methodology (taking rebounds per 48 minutes and dividing by average number of total rebounds from both sides per game), Fortson grabbed 21.7% of the available rebounds in 2002 with Golden State, and he's on pace to do something pretty close to that this year with Seattle.
