Who are really the best rebounders and shot blockers?

Posted by HoopsAvenue on July 8, 2008 under NBA Stats |

If I were to ask you to name the best rebounders and shotblockers in the NBA, you’d probably rattle off some names like Dwight Howard, Marcus Camby, and other players on the league leaders list, and rightfully so…but, what if they didn’t have their height advantage? What if Dwight Howard was 6′5″? Would he still be a good rebounder? Better than a 6′5″ Nate Robinson? Of course we will never know the actual answer to this, but we can make some guesstimates. I took a look at the height of all the players in the league, their rebounding abilities, and shotblocking prowess to come up with two prediction models. Basically, you tell the model how tall a guy is and it’ll tell you how many rebounds he should get and how many blocks he should get. If you’re Nate Robinson, expectations are low, but if you’re Dwight Howard you’re gonna have to put up some pretty big numbers.

So who did better than expected according to the model? Here are the top 10 rebounders with the percentages indicating how many rebounds they got per 40 minutes compared to how many they were expected to pull down:

Chuck Hayes	169%
Reggie Evans	169%
Dwight Howard	167%
Jason Kidd	161%
Shawn Marion	157%
Nick Collison	157%
Marcus Camby	155%
Kurt Thomas	153%
Bonzi Wells	147%
David Lee	147%

So you can see Dwight Howard is a great rebounder no matter how you look at it. Here are the numbers for blocks:

Josh Smith	311%
Marcus Camby	286%
Jason Maxiell	246%
Samuel Dalembert	192%
Chris Kaman	187%
Amare Stoudemire	186%
Andray Blatche	186%
Ben Wallace	183%
Dwyane Wade	176%
Delonte West	176%

Mostly big guys who you’d expect there, but Jason Maxiell at 6′7″ is impressive. Ben Wallace is still looking good and almost certainly would have topped the list a few years ago. And, don’t underestimate the shotblocking abilities of Dwyane Wade and Delonte West, both whom just qualified for the list with 0.76 Blocks per 40 minutes. The minimum requirements were 0.75 Blocks per 40 minutes and 1500 minutes. For rebounds, they were 5 Rebounds per 40 minutes and 1500 minutes.

Perhaps the most impressive player from these top 10 lists is Marcus Camby, ranking on both lists despite that fact that the model has high expectations for a 6′11″ player such as himself. I’d guess he would drop off the lists if we adjusted for wingspan, though.

If you’re interested, a similar analysis was done for the 2004-05 season at lowpost.net. The analysis over there factored in height as well as body mass index (BMI) and even devotes some special attention to the Knicks. It’s worth checking out.