Don't look now but our offensive rebounding is improving

It's something we have struggled with all season. It's been a great hindrance to our offensive efficiency. It's been perhaps our largest weakness this season. It is offensive rebounding.

To understand how our offensive rebounding performs, I like to look at Offensive Rebounding Percentage (OR%) instead of pure counts. The reason is that it normalizes for thing

s that can skew the results. For example, if you force a lot of turnovers and the opponent doesn't get up shots, it can make your offensive rebounds seem artificially low. There are numerous other reasons as well -- OR% does the best at normalizing these out.

How is it calculated? Basically it is equal to your offensive rebounds divided by your offensive rebounds plus opponents defensive rebounds. It truly is the percentage of rebounds that are up for grab that you get. For example, if Drake has 10 offensive rebounds in a game and the opponent has 20 defensive rebounds, Drake's OR% is 33.3% (10 / 30).

The MVC tends to run at a slightly lower OR% than the national average. So far this year, the average OR% for MVC teams is 33.4%, with the best team being Wichita State at 39.3% and the worst team being Bradley at 25.6%. The Bulldogs come in ninth at 26.3% for the season, 7.1% below the average and only 0.8% ahead of the worst team. Nationally, we come out at 303rd in the nation, so that should underscore how big of a difficulty we have had on the offensive boards this season.

Looking at it game to game, there certainly is an interesting trend:

The blue line represents our game by game results for OR%. As you can see, we were sitting roughly around 30% for the first five games of the season. Starting with the Colorado State game, our performance on the offensive boards dropped substantially, to the point that we had back to back games of 11%.

However, with the last two games, we have seen a renewed fury to the boards, logging OR% results of 36% (Dartmouth) and 34% (Chicago State). This is essentially back to where we were at in the beginning of the season. It certainly doesn't put us in the ballpark of greatness -- if you exclude our results of the Eastern Michigan, Boise State, Iowa games, we improve from 26.3% to 29.9%, good for 258th nationally and only 3.5% below the average team in the MVC. Again, nothing to celebrate, but something that will desperately limit a disparity that has of late put significant pressure on the offense.

Now, a fair point to make is to question the quality of competition in Dartmouth and Chicago State. Fair point. Dartmouth comes in at 298th nationally in OR% allowed. Chicago State comes in at 311th nationally in OR% allowed. So our improved performances were against teams that really struggle in limiting other teams offensive rebounds. To that I'll kindly note that:

1. Given the level we were rebounding at and the level of improvement, it's a notable achievement regardless of the opponent.
2. Colorado State was not a strong opponent when we started our slide (24% OR% in that game, against a team that is 228th nationally at preventing offensive rebounds).
3. Even though the other teams in our offensive rebounding skid were better opponents, when you adjust for opponent difficulty (in other words, adjusting for the fact that some teams allow different OR%'s) we still were coming out way low in our skid.

Given those items, I'm cautiously optimistic about our performance the last two games.

Can the improvement continue? Tomorrow comes the real test. The Southern Illinois Salukis are beasts on the boards, allowing only 27.9% of opportunities to be rebounded by the other team's offense. That's good for 29th in the country. With 6-9 Gene Teague and 6-7 Mamadou Seck patrolling the defensive glass, it's going to be a tall task to keep this improvement going along. But it's important, and with some help from Jordan Clarke coming back and what looks to be an improving Kraidon Woods, perhaps we can keep this trend rolling forward.