The Blueprint: How Offensive Rebounding Is Fueling a Historic Scoring Season

Several years ago, Louisville men’s basketball coach Pat Kelsey embarked on an offseason study of Michigan State. He wanted to better understand how the Spartans, led by Hall-of-Fame coach Tom Izzo, always seemed to be among the best teams in the country despite an apparent reluctance to embrace some of the sport’s new-wave, offensive ideology trickling in from Europe and the NBA. Kelsey was fascinated by the way Izzo reached eight Final Fours and won 11 Big Ten regular-season titles while embracing wildly different principles. He considers Izzo to be “one of the greatest coaches in the history of college basketball,” in part because of the sustained success. The Spartans were not, as far as Kelsey could tell, adopters of the “free throws, rim-shot 3s” approach that seems to be infiltrating the game at a remarkable pace. But night after night, month after month, season after season, Michigan State always won. How? “What they emphasize, they’re great at,” Kelsey told me last month. “One of those is offensive rebounding, you know? Coach Izzo became one of the great offensive rebounding gurus.” Kelsey was one of numerous coaches who told me that a drastic rewiring of how offensive rebounding is viewed, valued and taught across the country has helped fuel college basketball’s current offensive explosion. This season, nearly three times as many teams are averaging at least 120 points per 100 possessions than any of the last 30 seasons, according to KenPom. As the NCAA Tournament approaches, 71 teams are securing offensive rebounds on at least 34% of their field goal attempts, a number that was only at 27 teams five years ago. There are 315 players averaging at least two offensive rebounds per game this season, up from 251 five years ago. All shapes and sizes are now crashing the glass. When coupled with what we explored in Part 2 of this series — the evolution of shot selection as teams lean more heavily into analytics and 3-pointers — it becomes easier to understand why offenses are operating so efficiently this season. More offensive rebounding creates more possessions, and more possessions are now ending with made 3s than ever before. Second-chance points, perimeter shooting and offensive efficiency all go hand in hand. “Part of the secret sauce is the rebounding,” Texas head coach Sean Miller told me. “When teams used to heave up all those 3s, what they were sacrificing is they would miss and they couldn’t get a rebound. Now, you’re rebounding on 3-point shots like never before.” In Part 3 of this series, we launch ourselves into the world of offensive rebounding, as college basketball’s keenest minds explain how crashing the glass is contributing to what might be the greatest scoring season in the sport’s history. [THE BLUEPRINT: Offense-First Player Acquisition | Shot Selection] *** *** *** Miller: If you track it and start to look at Final Fours, one common theme that most, if not all, of those teams had was they’re prolific on the offensive glass. There’s always exceptions, but the teams who rebound the best, the second-shot opportunities, to me, went the furthest in the tournament. Obviously, that has a lot to do with offensive efficiency. The game changed in Europe, and then it changed in the NBA, copying Europe. Now it’s worked its way to college where teams are crashing the glass on 3-point shots, and they’re crashing the glass more with perimeter players than ever before. Kelvin Sampson, Houston: Not everybody tries to score off an offensive rebound anymore. They grab it, they throw it back out and shoot a 3. I’m convinced we’re going to have some games where if a team takes 50 shots, 40 of them are going to be 3s. And then that triggers or mandates how you’re going to recruit. Grant McCasland, Texas Tech: I think what everyone has always done is taught what they’ve been taught, which is take [the ball] right back up when you [get an offensive] rebound. And I would have been in that camp when I first started 20 years ago. Why wouldn’t you do that? Then you learn about the dagger 3, and then you see the numbers behind it, and I think people are starting to lean into that more often, obviously some more than others. T.J. Otzelberger, Iowa State: If you catch [an offensive rebound] on balance in the paint, go right back up and score. If you catch it off-balance or out of the paint, spray it for a 3. That’s something we work on every single day. Having Milan Momcilovic on our team, a deadly 3-point shooter, that’s usually the pathway to getting him the best 3s that we can get him. Miller: It’s called corner crashing, 3-point crashing. There’s another term, tagging up, which basically everybody goes [for the rebound]. I’ve been doing it for 21 years as a head coach. That term and that philosophy didn’t exist just a few short years ago. Jon Scheyer, Duke: When you think about the math game, there’s been a shift. Teams are way more aggressive crashing offensive glass, which creates more opportunities there. I think that’s kind of the possession battle. McCasland: Those are numbers games [and] how you win the game is creating more opportunities and getting more shots than your opponent. And then, obviously, that’s a high-percentage shot, at least statistically, the kick-out 3. Why wouldn’t you try to utilize something that’s got a higher percentage of success and gets you more possessions? Kelsey: You look at our offensive rebounding numbers for a lot of years, we very much value offensive rebounding. There was a guy on my staff several years ago, Dave Davis, who was a famous Division II coach. He had a bunch of 6-foot dudes, and they led the country in offensive rebounding several years at the D-II level. … He wrote a document called the “Rebounding Manifesto,” and he was our rebounding coordinator and coached it and brought that philosophy to us. You look at his teams and the way they shot a million 3s, they played incredibly fast, they crushed the offensive rebounds, and he just owned that. Our big thing is if you get an offensive rebound and you’ve got a clean finish, a clean look at the rim, you better make it or get fouled. If not, obviously look for that kick-out 3. It’s something that we celebrate. Miller: There are extra possessions now that didn’t exist years ago because teams — and Illinois would be Exhibit A — they shoot a ton of 3s, almost 51% or more of their shots are from 3. But if you look at how they rebound the ball, it’s different than it ever was. And there’s all these extra possessions that I think make them more efficient and give them more points per possession than teams five, six years ago who didn’t do that. Matt Painter, Purdue: It starts with possessions. If you turn the ball over a lot and you don’t get rebounds, you’re probably not going to be efficient because you don’t have as many possessions. So the No. 1 thing is, if you want to be efficient, don’t turn the ball over. … If you can play without turning the ball over and you’re a really good offensive rebounding team, you automatically have an advantage. If you’re just a one-trick pony and you’re really a perimeter-oriented team, you better learn to be able to drive the basketball. You’ve got to be able to get to the free-throw line in some capacity, whether that’s off the glass, whether that’s in the post or whether that’s driving the ball. Ben McCollum, Iowa: It seems like teams are focusing a little bit more on offensive rebounding, but I think that goes back to the same theory of there’s not as much toughness and grit to box out. A guy that’s been to three different schools or is getting paid a lot of money, his last interest is to make sure that he consistently boxes out, right? And so, then you get O-boards, and then, naturally, with offensive rebounds, they either kick out or go back up. Kelsey: Rebounding is a mentality as much as it is a technique. It’s grit, it’s hustle, it’s nastiness, it’s toughness, it’s all things that we want to be known as. But we put such a value on offensive rebounding. Every day we measure certain things, and one of them is offensive rebounding. We grade our guys on every single opportunity: Did you do your job, or did you not? And as you can imagine, that takes hours to grade and to evaluate. But since we invest so much time on it and the players know that’s important to me, we’re usually good at it. Come back on Thursday for Part 4 in this series, which explores how on-court processing and individual decision-making has expanded from point guards to all five positions, which is rendering college basketball smarter than it’s ever been before. In The Blueprint, our in-depth, long-form series takes you inside some of the most amazing stories in sports.