How Rebounds Work

As a competitive basketball player at center(the biggest player, typically) I can attest to more than the occasional randomness of rebounding. The main goal is keeping your man, on offense or defense, from getting the ball. Then worry about rebounding the ball, yourself.

I usually enjoy reading these "advanced metrics" findings in the basketball realm, but this one isn't much. I guess it allows for these pictures to be printed out and hung up somewhere, but anyone who has played basketball competitively knows this as an instinct. Heck, I imagine most people who simply take a hard look at the angles can intuit this.

The rebound visualizer widget is the illest thing

http://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/vip/espn-grantland/as...

Edit: damn, I need to git gud with D3

Another cool basketball article: http://grantland.com/features/expected-value-possession-nba-...

Clicked expecting relationship advice. Stayed to learn about basketball.

goldsberry says that randomness in rebounding is one of the things that keeps basketball interesting in the era of advanced analytics.

but as a player, there's not much to it. of course it helps if you're tall, but if you're diligent about boxing out and go after the ball, you'll get rebounds. you don't need to over-think the randomness since it will average out over a game. and if your teammates are doing their jobs boxing out, your team should have favorable chances of getting rebounds just through floor coverage alone.

ps - http://www.secondspectrum.com is doing some really cool visualization of sportsvu data from the nba.

I'd be curious about the results when taking fatigue into consideration. Seems like a person shooting in the 4th on tired legs is more likely either shoot short or over shoot by a larger margin due to their fatigue affecting fine motor skills.

I can't think of anyone more highly attuned to the instinct part of this than Dennis Rodman.