Doctor MJ wrote:Going through this quick, so let me know if there's a detail you covered that I missed:
-I believe that technically in accordance to the rule book, the wording implies that every rebounding starts a new possession.
-When statisticians started getting serious though, they either ignored this, or didn't check it at all, because Offensive and Defensive Efficiency stats are far more straight forward to make meaningful use of if you don't call an offensive rebound the start of the new possession.
Having participated in the conversation that ultimately settled on the "offensive rebounds don't create new possessions" "rule", the perspective that every rebound creates a new possession was not ignored. We analyzed it to death. The analysis was more robust when going with "offensive rebounds extend possessions" than it was otherwise. "Efficiency" actually meant something rather than just being an interesting stat.
I'm not sure whether the official rule book was consulted, but it wouldn't have persuaded us one way or another. The rule book is about governing/running a game, not about generating meaningful statistical data. Possession rules of the game are for letting refs know when to reset the shot clock.
When an offense gets the ball and brings it across the half court line, their goal is essentially just to score as many points as possible before relinquishing the ball (obviously there's a touch more to it than that). To that end, the offensive strategy is developed not simply to try to get one good shot off, but also when possible to get the ball back after that shot for another crack at it. Hence, Dennis Rodman has a valuable role to play in helping his team's offense be as successful as possible even if he isn't there to score himself (and hence, Michael Jordan can claim to have played on exceptionally good offenses).
One might argue that it would be more accurate if Rodman's contributions here weren't included as "offense". I'm not going to say that's wrong. However, it would be very confusing when people tried to do apples-to-apples comparisons of offenses if we ignored the role guys like Rodman were playing to support their teammates while their teammates were playing "offense".
As DeanO once said, rebounding is not a separate part of the game. It's not like football where there's offense, defense and special teams. In basketball, there's offense and defense. Offensive rebounding is part of offense; defensive rebounding is part of defense.
Of course, as is, there are still difficulties when using an all purpose Offensive Rating. The Celtics prioritize getting back on transition defense ahead of crashing the offensive boards, so quite literally, the team is putting less offensive effort in than other teams, and an Offensive Rating won't tell you why, and might imply a general incompetence rather than a strategic choice. But that's why we have more detailed stats to go along with the broad strokes ones.
I wouldn't consider this example to be a difficulty with offensive rating. Teams make strategic trade-offs all the time. Boston, for example, sacrifices some offensive efficiency (through getting offensive rebounds) in exchange for getting back on defense and limiting the opponent's chances of an easy score. It would be reasonably simple to do a "back of the spreadsheet" calculation to see if that strategic choice makes sense. Knowing some of their stat guys (like Mike Zarren), I'm sure they've done the math and could tell you exactly what they're gaining on the defensive end versus what they're "giving up" on offense.
"A lot of what we call talent is the desire to practice."
-- Malcolm Gladwell
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