Of course, rebounding margin might be a sign of one team dominating the other, but not for the reasons some might think. Why are rebounds important? At the most basic level, it's the same reason why rushing is considered a fundamentally important aspect of any offense in football: ball control. The team who has more chances to score will probably win. So to that end, I'll tend to agree that yes, the team with the more rebounds has a better chance at winning, in theory. However, rebounding margin is one of the lesser stats correlated with winning, while field goal percentage is the most.
But why should number of raw rebounds matter the least in deciding who is the better rebounding team in a head to head match-up? What if one team is shooting 60% and the other shooting 30%? Obviously, the first team will have many more opportunities for rebounds (since, typically, a defense has about a 60-70% chance of getting a defensive rebound) than the first team. Very good teams without exception have many more rebounds than their opponents because very good teams shoot a much better percentage from the field than their opponents. Simple as that.
So specifically related to Duke: I actually am one of the few people who think rebounding will be the least of our concerns next year. In fact, I will contend that we will be a good rebounding team. In order to argue this, though, I need to do some groundwork.
What's interesting to note is that after Shelden Williams graduated, a lot of critics suggested that Duke would have trouble rebounding without him in the paint. Of course, in reality, the 07 Devils were a much better rebounding team than the 06 Devils. In 06, our team rebounded about 29.61% of offensive rebounds, and 60.01% of defensive rebounds. This is incredibly bad. The slightly shocking part of it all is that Shelden Williams was such a dominant rebounder (12% OR, 22.6% DR by himself). So, of course, the common pundit might suggested that losing Williams from an already abhorrent rebounding team will simply make the team even worse on the boards.
In 07, however, we were one of the best rebounding teams in the ACC. We rebounded 35.03% of offensive rebounds and 67.12% of defensive rebounds, in spite of losing one of our best rebounders of all time. How does that work? Well, one notion that I will try to dispel is the idea that our change of pace affected our rebounding somehow. In 06, we also averaged about 71.6 possessions a game, which dipped to about 66.4 in 07. The suggestion might be, then, that because we played a fairly slower game, we had more people to crash the boards and a greater ability to grab rebounds on both sides.
Taking a quick look at the stats for ACC teams this year, what I find is that there is really no discernible correlation between tempo and rebounding.
| Team | Tempo | OR% | DR% |
| North Carolina | 73.92 | 39.43 | 70.77 |
| Maryland | 73.64 | 36.66 | 63.93 |
| Wake Forest | 72.57 | 30.75 | 66.83 |
| Virginia | 71.67 | 33.49 | 66.58 |
| Georgia Tech | 70.62 | 41.36 | 67.26 |
| Clemson | 68.76 | 37.85 | 66.47 |
| Florida State | 68.22 | 35.01 | 63.89 |
| North Carolina State | 67.56 | 27.74 | 66.08 |
| Duke | 66.38 | 35.03 | 67.12 |
| Miami | 66.24 | 38.48 | 66.37 |
| Boston College | 66.16 | 38.07 | 62.65 |
| Virginia Tech | 65.57 | 32.71 | 65.78 |
What I find most interesting about this list, actually, is not just how little tempo has to do with rebounding, but how little offensive rebounding has to do with defensive rebounding. Boston College and NC State are especially interesting. NC State is at once the worst (by far) offensive rebounding team in the ACC, but still was a decent defensive rebounding team. BC was one of the better offensive rebounding teams in the league, but the worst defensive rebounding team. This, at the very least, really hammers home the point that the two are completely different stats and should be entirely separated. At any rate, tempo does not appear to be a substantial factor in rebounding. Duke was the 3rd best defensive rebounding team behind the much faster UNC and the faster Georgia Tech. That being said, I am still not willing to preclude the possibility that tempo has some effect on rebounding.
Now, looking at a list of the top 15 rebounders in the ACC (these are all players with over 40% of minutes - so at least 16 minutes a game or so) it seems that rebounding is mostly a function of personnel.
| Player | DR% |
| Jason Cain (UVA) | 20.65 |
| Reyshawn Terry (UNC) | 20.22 |
| Ra'Sean Dickey (GT) | 19.52 |
| Ekene Ibekwe (UMD) | 19.06 |
| Kyle Visser (WFU) | 18.74 |
| Brandon Costner (NCSU) | 18.73 |
| Josh McRoberts (Duke) | 18.71 |
| Uche Echefu (FSU) | 18.45 |
| James Gist (UMD) | 17.68 |
| David McClure (Duke) | 17.67 |
| Tyler Hansbrough (UNC) | 17.04 |
| Jeremis Smith (GT) | 16.6 |
| James Mays (Clemson) | 16.41 |
| Al Thornton (FSU) | 16.35 |
| Dwayne Collins (UM) | 16.16 |
Each of the three best defensive rebounding teams has 2 players in the top 15. Maryland is sort of the strange one since Gist and Ibekwe were both excellent defensive rebounders yet they still were not a very good defensive rebounding team. The problem for UMD was more that outside of those 2 guys, the other major players (Vasquez, Jones, Strawberry) were nearly non-existent defensive rebounders. This may have been affected by style, since Maryland had a tendency to shoot off on a break with those three guys leaving the frontcourt to clean up rebounds. So maybe Maryland is an example of a high tempo team that suffers on the boards because of its style.
Now it may seem an obvious and stupid conclusion that personnel has a huge impact on rebounding. But I think the conclusion is a little more subtle than that. The idea is not that you need one guy in the paint who can rebound really well or something, it's that you need a team who can come together to grab a lot of rebounds. For instance, just looking at Duke, we had 6 guys who played over 40% of minutes, and of those 6, 4 of them averaged 10% or more of the defensive rebounds (Nelson, Henderson, McClure, McRoberts). Looking at UNC, they also had 6 players who averaged 40% of minutes or more, and they also had 4 of them grab on average over 10% of defensive rebounds (Ginyard, Terry, Wright, Hansbrough). Georgia Tech had 7 guys over 40% of minutes, and 6 of them averaged over 10% DR rate (Crittenton, Young, Smith, Dickey, Peacock, West).
It seems that having one or two really reliable defensive rebounders is key, but then you also need several support guys who can contribute a lot of defensive rebounds as well. So, now that the groundwork is done, what will Duke be like in 08?
Well, the kneejerk reaction is to say that we will be worse off because of losing McRoberts. I actually don't think this is exactly true. I do think we will probably be a worse defensive rebounding team, but not because of McRoberts. Say, for instance, our line-up is Paulus, Henderson, Nelson, McClure, Zoubek next year. We would actually be a very good rebounding team with McClure and Zoubek in the frontcourt and very good rebounding wingmen Henderson and Nelson. I think this line-up will see a fair bit of burn. But factoring in guys like Singler (unproven, so I can't predict how well he'll do), Scheyer (not a good rebounder) or Thomas (could become a decent rebounder, but wasn't his first year) will probably affect our ability to rebound. That being said, though, McClure only played a little over 700 minutes this year (53% of total) with much of the time he spent sitting being filled in by Lance Thomas, and we were still the 3rd best defensive rebounding team in the ACC.
The point is, a lot of Duke fans want to see a return to the faster paced teams of the the late 80s, early 90s and the late 90s, early 00s. This 07 Duke team was tremendously slow by Duke standards. Yet there is also a fear that we will not be able to rebound well enough to get out on a break. I don't really believe that at all. I think we will be, again, a very good rebounding team with the tools to run a faster paced offense (71, or 72 possessions a game would be nice to see run well).
The other point I wanted to make was simply that rebounding is misunderstood and covered poorly by basketball analysts. Just look back at ESPN's top 10 best teams of the last decade: they actually criticized a 2001 Duke team for having a smaller rebounding margin despite being a more efficient offensive team than any other champion on the list and being among the better defensive teams.
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