Rebounding and Transition

A few years ago I read an article or two about Offensive Rebounding and Transition Defense Points Per Possession (PPP). I wish I saved the articles or could find them now but I remember reading that if you went for Offensive Rebound (had a high OREB%) you would be giving up points in Transition. I decided to look at the 2019-2020 season of both College Men and Women to see if that was still the case. Here is a very quick, short breakdown.

Thanks to HerHoopStat.com, Kenpom.com, and Synergy I was able to pull the data. As well, thanks to some help from a colleague, I put the data into Excel, made a quick scatter plot, and ran the regression to see if there was a correlation. Here are the charts:

A quick basic rule of this kind of statistic for the R squared (R^2) value, the closer to 1.0 the more X and Y are correlated. The same is true for not being correlated; the closer to 0.0. In these cases X is OREB% and Y is Tran DEF PPP.

The Women have an R^2 of 0.0049 and Men have an R^2 of 0.0285. Both are very close to 0.0. From this information, we can see there is NOT a correlation between the two. There are a few outliers in which the higher the team's OREB% the more they give up in Transition Defense but that is not the case for the majority of the team's. The orange dot in the middle of both pictures is the average amongst all the D1 teams.

So what does this mean?

1. The articles I read a few years ago, will need to be re-looked at. I did not go back to look at historical figures to see if it was true 5, 10, 15 years ago. If it was true, the trend has changed.

2. If you want to value Off. Rebs, you should. In theory, you don't have to worry about giving up Transition Points. In fact, there are several teams that have some of the highest OREB% and the lowest Def Tran PPP.

3. I used to argue that you would give up Transition Points in going after Off. Rebounds. Based off this, I will not be arguing that anymore.

4. The next step would be to look at what teams do when they shoot. Are they sending 5 to the glass? If your players are below the FT Line are you crashing on the shot? Do certain positions/players always get back? What are teams doing to practice Off. Rebounding? What happens when a team doesn't get the Off. Reb.?

I wanted to try and get a bigger picture of Transition PPP and Rebounding. So, I also looked at the Women's reverse, DREB% and Offensive Transition PPP:

The R^2 in this case was 0.0702. Also, not very correlated. What does this mean? A variety of things. With over 350 teams, I think it is clear that teams value different things. Rebounding and transition might be important. Or Rebounding and controlling the pace. By looking at this it can raise other questions. Maybe to look at PPP and Pace? Transition PPP and Pace? How about OREB% and DREB%? How does OREB% or DREB% compare to Win%? Or maybe Total REB% and Win%?

Another thought I had doing this was maybe to compare across conferences or take a deep look at the teams in a specific conference. I wonder what those numbers might show. Again, this was supposed to a quick, short look at Rebounding and Transition PPP. I think this serves as a good baseline for a quick understanding. I am no expert at running regressions. I like to look at numbers and see if I can find a correlation or put some numbers down to things I was already thinking. You never know when you may find something that surprises you.