A Good Offensive Rebounding Team? (Part 2)

Last time I talked about one approach towards building a metric that could be used to sensibly compare two teams in offensive rebounding.  That approach was to use average percentages adjusted for difficulty of schedule.  In this post I'll talk about another approach.

The problem of comparing teams has been addressed in many different ways for team (scoring) strength.  That has many of the same problems as comparing teams for offensive rebounding strength.  So we can adopt a good measure for comparing team scoring strength and use it for comparing team offensive rebounding strength.  It's easiest to do this with a model that is driven by team scores (rather than wins & losses), such as the PMM, Massey or MOV-Based Terry-Bradley, etc.  The basic idea is to use offensive rebounding numbers instead of scores to drive the ratings.

I did this and calculated the current top ten offensive rebounding teams:

Rank	Team	Score
1	Quinnipiac	19.26
2	UAB	18.09
3	Purdue	17.36
4	North Carolina	17.14
5	VCU	16.85
6	Morehead St.	16.66
7	Tennessee	16.5
8	San Diego St.	16.37
9	LSU	16.16
10	Morgan St.	16.15

Compare this to the table from the last posting:

Rank	Team	Rating	Total
1	North Carolina (15-7)	1.36	295
2	Quinnipiac (13-8)	1.35	357
3	San Diego St. (20-1)	1.31	217
4	UAB (14-8)	1.28	284
5	Northern Illinois (10-11)	1.26	257
6	Tennessee (14-8)	1.26	312
7	Purdue (14-9)	1.24	289
8	Arizona (22-1)	1.24	277
9	Indiana (14-8)	1.23	268
10	Long Beach St. (9-13)	1.23	212

There's quite a bit of overlap.  Some teams have moved up or down, but note again that in this measure just grabbing lots of offensive rebounds isn't sufficient.  With this approach we can also easily look at teams by offensive rebounding advantage -- at how much advantage you have over your opponents:

Rank	Team	Score
1	Quinnipiac	20.28
2	Tennessee	19.33
3	Boise St.	18.55
4	Stephen F. Austin	18.49
5	Morehead St.	18.33
6	Southern Miss	17.79
7	West. Kentucky	17.64
8	Providence	17.59
9	UAB	17.44
10	Syracuse	17.36

There's some overlap here, but a number of new teams appear.  These are teams that are decent offensive rebounders, but are also pretty good at keeping the other team from grabbing offensive rebounds.

Any of these measure is better for understanding offensive rebounding performance than just looking at the raw numbers of offensive rebounds (as commentators are wont to do).