Offensive Rebounds: What are they good for Tournament edition

by Richard Douglas

In part 1 of our study of offensive rebounding prowess in college basketball, we discovered that while its certainly a  positive to grab the offensive glass, its not nearly as important as most other factors.  But that was over the course of a season.  Does it play a bigger factor though during the Tournament, with the smaller subset of games, and give us any sort of predictive power for how a team will do ?

Taking the results over the last 5 years, we first tried to correlate a team’s wins to its seasonal offensive rebounding percentage.  When doing so, we get some bad news.  The R^2 value is only about .09, meaning that there is very little relationship between offensive rebounds and Tournament wins.

This result matches what we had found with the seasonal rebounding rates and winning percentage, just not a high correlation.  But, pressing forward, let’s see if there is a statistically significant difference between teams that won 0 games and advanced to the Final Four and beyond.

After running our ANOVA tests, we see that at the 95% confidence level there is a difference between the different offensive rebounding rates of teams that won 0,1,2,3,4,5 and 6 games.  The teams fell into 3 categories of rebounding, the first consisting of teams that won no games, who averaged just 33.6% offensive rebounds.  Teams falling into the second category that won 1-5 games, with an average rebounding rate of 35.9%.  Finally, National Champions came out on top, with an average rebounding rate of 38%.  Below is the chart for each subset of wins and their average rebounding rate.

While there is a statistically significant difference, we do however find that the significance of this difference is quite low.  In fact, our calculated Omega^2 is 0.0%, meaning that the offensive rebounding rate of teams is drastically less important than most other factors for a team.  It is again, a positive for a team to be able to grab offensive rebounds, its not such a big deal when compared to a team's shooting and defense.