Stumbling on Wins offers the following two observations regarding rebounding in the NBA:
- A player’s per-minute rebounding is very consistent across time. Players who excel at rebounding, seem to always excel at rebounding. Players who do not excel at rebounding seem to never learn this skill.
- In moving from college to the NBA, rebounding appears to be a skill that continues. In other words, players who are good at rebounding in college tend to be good at rebounding in the pros. And those who do not rebound well in college do not rebound well in the pros.
All of this suggests that rebounding is a skill. Yesterday Jonah Lehrer –– author of How We Decide (an excellent book on behavioral economics and decision-making) – posted Basketball and Jazz at wired.com. This post reviews research explaining the mental aspect of rebounding.
A few years ago, a team of Italian neuroscientists conducted a simple study on rebounding. At first glance, rebounding looks like a brute physical skill: The tallest guy (or the one with the highest vertical) should always end up with the ball. But this isn’t what happens. Instead, some of the best rebounders in the history of the NBA, such as Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley, were several inches shorter than their competitors. What allowed these players to get to the ball first?
The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time. The athletes were also far quicker with their guesses, and were able to make accurate predictions about where the ball would end up before it was even airborne. (This suggests that the players were tracking the body movements of the shooter, and not simply making judgments based on the arc of the ball.) The coaches and writers, meanwhile, could only predict a make or miss after the shot, which required an additional 300 milliseconds.
What allowed the players to make such speedy judgments? By monitoring the brains and bodies of subjects as they watched free throws, the scientists were able to reveal something interesting about the best rebounders. It turned out that elite athletes, but not coaches and journalists, showed a sharp increase in activity in the motor cortex and their hand muscles in the crucial milliseconds before the ball was released. The scientists argue that this extra activity was due to a “covert simulation of the action,” as the athletes made a complicated series of calculations about the trajectory of the ball based on the form of the shooter. (Every NBA player, apparently, excels at unconscious trigonometry.) But here’s where things get fascinating: This increase in activity only occurred for missed shots. If the shot was going in, then their brains failed to get excited. Of course, this makes perfect sense: Why try to anticipate the bounce of a ball that can’t be rebounded? That’s a waste of mental energy.
The larger point is that even a simple skill like rebounding reflects an astonishing amount of cognitive labor. The reason we don’t notice this labor is because it happens so fast, in the fraction of a fraction of a second before the ball is released. And so we assume that rebounding is an uninteresting task, a physical act in a physical game. But it’s not, which is why the best rebounders aren’t just taller or more physical or better at boxing out – they’re also faster thinkers. This is what separates the Kevin Loves and Kevin Garnetts from everyone else on the court: They know where the ball will end up first.
Such research suggests that rebounding may not be a skill that is easy to teach. If some people can see where the ball might be going before the shooter even takes the shot, these players will always have the advantage in the rebounding game. And hence, the players with this mental skill will tend to be good rebounders (and those without the skill will not).
This suggests that NBA decision-makers should not believe that poor rebounders in college will some how change this behavior in the NBA. It may be the case the poor rebounders are not suffering from a lack of physical skill or desire. These players might just lack the ability to see where the ball is going.
Let me close by noting another result reported in Stumbling on Wins. Stacey Brook, Aju Fenn and I recently published a study (a study detailed in the book) of what factors impact where a player is drafted. Of the factors in the box score, rebounding and turnovers are the only factors that do not have a statistical impact on draft position.
Will that change this year? Kenneth Faried was an amazing rebounder at the college level. Again, that suggests Faried will be a good rebounder in the NBA. So will teams take notice and focus on Faried? Or will the scorers (a skill that doesn’t translate so well) once again get chosen first?
– DJ
P.S. Hat Tip to John in the comments for alerting me to the Jonah Lehrer article (although I would have seen it eventually since I read Lehrer at wired.com on a regular basis).
Wages of Wins Journal 
reservoirgod
June 8, 2011
OK, so Faried probably has the mental skills to know where the ball is going & we KNOW he has the physical skills to grab the rebound when he gets there (see http://bleacherreport.com/articles/714228-off-the-index-what-makes-a-great-rebounder). Only question remaining is how many GMs will pass on him in the draft?
brgulker
June 8, 2011
Looks like he’s going in the 20s…
jbrett
June 8, 2011
Of course, we also know, because we’ve been told so often, that some players can override these signals from their brains, and choose to NOT rebound missed shots, leaving other, less talented players to pad their stats, artificially inflating their value to their teams. Because ANYONE can grab those boards, right? Right?
Italian Stallion
June 8, 2011
This is all very logical, but I do recall Dennis Rodman saying in an interview that he had done some kind of probability studies to help him anticipate where rebounds would go depending on where the shot was taken from. He would position himself as soon as the shot went up.
I think rebounding is probably one part knowledge, on part effort, and one part the mental skills being described above.
What may be true is that if you haven’t put in both the physical and mental effort necessary to become a good rebounder when you are young, you probably wont put it in later either.
Tommy_Grand
June 8, 2011
Fascinating topic!
Obviously, you need to be fast + strong and possess long arms and large hands to grab a rebound away from 9 NBA players. But if some players possess a mental edge, that would seem to match trends in the data that would otherwise be chalked up to luck or hustle.
You wrote: “It may be the case the poor rebounders are not suffering from a lack of physical skill or desire. These players might just lack the ability to see where the ball is going.”
Similarly, it might be the case that good rebounders do not possess any extra desire, they just have an advantage.
EntityAbyss
June 8, 2011
Wow, this is amazing. I get the feeling that somehow, someway, somebody’s gonna argue against this. This is an excellent article. This gets 3 thumbs up. Maybe I can work on my awareness on the court… or at least try.
Yack
June 8, 2011
Firstly to suggest Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley were not amazing athletes is ludicrous. (That is not stated explicitly, only that they were not tall, but it is suggested.)
As well, to suggest that only athleticism (or rather height, because even though strength and jumping ability are mentioned, Barkley and Rodman would fail to be appropriate examples if these attributes were considered) would even at first glance be all that is necessary to get a rebound, shows little understanding of the game. Rebounding is beyond even size and athleticism, about timing, and beyond even timing, about positioning; which is why a smaller man can box out a larger one and get the rebound most of the time. And positioning is something that a player like Rodman or Barkley was fighting for well before the shot even went up. To get inside, to be closer to the basket. So long as you are not exactly beneath it, this gives you a much better chance to get the rebound. (And that’s where these players spent their time on offense and on defense, where they were supposed to be.)
So even if some players are intrinsically better rebounders, fighting for this type of positioning is something that can be taught. If a big player (or really any player, though it it is likely to be more effective with bigs), and especially a player who has little offensive ability in terms of scoring the ball should be taught not to try to get himself into a scoring position, but a rebounding one.
Where is that? Generally on the weak side of the basket. Something like 70% of balls that are missed end up on the weak side. So if a player positions himself there on offense, he will be in good position to get a fair amount of balls. Perhaps not all aspects of rebounding can be taught, but there are aspects that can be taught and learned and executed on the court, even beyond what has been said here.
The problem is not this, but as alluded to earlier in this blog, that though coaches implicitly understand rebounding is important, they also have a hard time overlooking certain inabilities (or ugliness) in scoring, which is why Joakim Noah was almost traded for Spencer Hawes two summers ago, which is why Kevin Love failed to get on the court for so long. (Though of course, both also are efficient scorers.)
The problem is that offenses and defenses tend to focus on the obvious problem, getting the ball in the hoop and keeping it from getting there, rather than the less obvious one, possessions. But perhaps this is thankful as well. I could see a scenario in which basketball players and teams were far more effective in terms of performing winning behaviors, and yet the game was more boring. Though, that might not be case as well.
Patrick Minton
June 8, 2011
Tommy Grand,
That is simply not true. I’d say Kevin Love is strong (but probably not abnormally so for an NBA power forward), but few indeed would call him fast and his arms are not long long relative to others at his height. Yet he’s the best rebounder in the NBA.
The things that conventional wisdom has taught you about rebounding don’t really hold up to the data.
Devin
June 8, 2011
Being a 5’8″ player whose primary skill was rebounding – and given my experience in coaching and refereeing – perhaps I can offer some insight on this.
The most important aspect of rebounding is anticipating where the ball will end up. If you know that, you’ve got it made. Unsurprisingly, this skill is not unique to basketball – soccer goalies and the best non-keeper soccer players are usually excellent anticipators as well.
The next important aspect is positioning, which is very closely related to anticipating where the ball will end up – you want to be able to find the quickest path to the ball given the location of the other players on the court, and, if the ball will end up close to where some “designated rebounders” are standing, you have to find a way to sneak up behind them and knock the ball away before they grab it.
Boxing out is important, but I’d rank it behind anticipation and positioning. Boxing out is most important when the ball is heading your way and other players are closing in; anticipation isn’t as important in these situations. But usually the ball is headed somewhere else, which is why anticipation is key.
The best rebounders can do all three of these things. And, all things being equal, it certainly helps if you have a higher reach and can jump, although being shorter can sometimes help, as opposing players consistently underestimate shorter players.
Tommy_Grand
June 8, 2011
Patrick,
I think my point was that maybe 98% of the US population is unequipped to be a top NBA rebounder, regardless of any mental gift for it.
I feel certain that Kevin Love falls into the top 2% of American males in terms of speed, strength, arm length, and hand size.
arturogalletti
June 8, 2011
I’ll just leave this here before the rush.
Daniel
June 10, 2011
@Tommy_Grand
If you’re 6’2″, you’re in the 95th percentile for height among American males (2 standard deviations above average). Kevin Love is 6’8″ with a 35″ vertical leap and benched 185 lbs 16x at the draft combine. If he was in the top 2% of American males, you would see guys this big and athletic every day walking down the street.
Love falls at least into the 99.9999th percentile (just the subset of NBA basketball players– as being young enough to actually play is an important thing to consider, one which great rebounders of the past no longer possess), which is why they get paid so much to play basketball and we don’t.
John
June 10, 2011
Thanks for the hat tip Mr Berri :)
Tommy_Grand
June 13, 2011
“I feel certain that Kevin Love falls into the top 2% of American males in terms of speed, strength, arm length, and hand size.”
“If he was in the top 2% of American males, you would see guys this big and athletic every day walking down the street.”
So he’s not in the top 2%? I was certain that he was. In fact, I’d have thought 2% was a conservative estimate.