Deffensive Rebounds: Uche Echefu and the Rest, Part I

This year, the FSU men's basketball team has emerged as a true tournament contender, and as of right now they are nationally ranked for the first time in over a decade. Their success has been a product of great offensive play from senior guard Toney Douglas and outstanding all-around team defense, highlighted by the shot blocking powers of redshirt freshman center, Solomon Alabi. The two main weaknesses this season have been turnovers and defensive rebounding. Recently, with the maturation of Alabi, Luke Louks, and Derwin Kitchen, I think that the Noles may have gotten over their turnover bugaboo. However, defensive rebounds continue to be a problem, which is both worrisome and puzzling, being that they are the tallest team in the nation, and are pretty good at corralling offensive rebounds.

What's wrong with us, and how can we improve? To try to answer this question, I will turn to the excellent pace-independent statistics provided by Ken Pomeroy. Caveat: When looking at statistics in any evaluation of player skill, it is important to remember that context matters. Team strategy and the abilities of the other four players on the floor impact individual statistics. For those who are interested, here is an interesting discussion of scheme and its affects on rebounding, at Basketball Prospectus.

First off, FSU grabs 36.7% of all offensive rebounds, good for 55th in the NCAA, but they allow opposing teams to reach 36.1% of rebounds on the defensive side of the court. This makes them the 284th best defensive rebounding team in the nation. Now, it's generally thought that offensive rebounding has more to do with athleticism and pursuit, whereas defensive rebounding depends on discipline and technique. (Of course, both offensive and defensive rebounding depend on scheme as well).

Looking at the individual rebounding statistics, it's instantly apparent that Alabi is FSU's best rebounder in an absolute sense, ranking 74th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage and 377th in defensive rebounding percentage. This makes intuitive sense, as Alabi is a 7-1 beast, who always plays in the paint when he's on the court. Note however, that he is a relatively better offensive rebounder than defensive one. The picture becomes more interesting, however, when we look at FSU's other frontcourt players. Chris Singleton and Ryan Reid rate 331st and 353th at offensive rebounding, but are not even within the national top 500 on the defensive glass. I am excluding Xavior Gibson from this analysis, as he plays significantly fewer minutes than the others.

The picture changes slightly when we look at senior Uche Echefu. This year, Uche has been the nations 360th best offensive rebounder and 488th best defensive rebounder. There is still a disparity between the two ratings, but it's the smallest disparity we've seen yet for an FSU player. Checking back one year to 2008, Uche was the nation's 419th best offensive rebounder, but 127th best defensive rebounder (actually, Uche's 2008 defensive rebounding rate was better than Alabi's rate this year). In fact, 2009 is the first time in Uche's career that he has rebounded better on the offensive glass than on the defensive. For comparison, Reid has ranked highly as an offensive rebounder in the past two seasons, but been out of the top 500 on the defensive end.

What does this all mean? I take it as strong evidence that Uche Echefu actually does something different on the defensive boards than all of the other FSU frontcourt players. The overall rebounding trend can be attributed to the scheme, but Uche outperforms his teammates who are used somewhat interchangeably within the same scheme. By only looking at the numbers, it is impossible to tell if he establishes position earlier, fights to hold his boxout longer, doesn't extend his defense as far on the perimeter, tries to block less shots, or any combination of these factors plus countless ones that I haven't thought of. For the next basketball game, I will devote all of my attention to the FSU frontcourt, to try to establish what is it exactly that Uche does that I sincerely hope he can pass on to his young teammates. Stay tuned for Part II.