Those are some Offensive Rebounds

Welcome to the second round of the NCAA Tournament — and what will be a hard act to follow after the historic victory by UMBC as a 16 seed over the number one overall seed Virginia. Go Retrievers!

If you have been following along — we have been cranking some in-depth analysis on March Madness match-ups using the NCAA play-by-play data in the BigQuery dataset. You can do this yourself and we encourage it OR you can just read more :-)

For today’s business we look at a different type of dog — a bulldog to be precise — as the Gonzaga Bulldogs (4) take on the Ohio State Buckeyes (5) in Boise, ID. Note: OSU’s mascot is named Brutus an anthropomorphic buckeye nut. Go nuts!

Background

Rebounding is a key trend to follow in just about any basketball game — especially when two physical teams match up against one another. It’s important to look at where the rebounds come from on both the offensive and defensive sides in addition to which players are involved, how many players are involved, and to what degree they’re involved.

Gonzaga is a strong rebounding team, averaging 39.9 rebounds per game (#10 in NCAA) and is especially stout on the defensive end, where they average 26.7 defensive rebounds per game (#13 in NCAA) and own a 79.4% defensive rebounding rate (#12 in the NCAA).

Ohio State sits a notch lower statistically (although they played in a much stronger conference — the Big 10 — than Gonzaga did — the West Coast Conference). Still, the Buckeyes average 37 rebounds per game including 25.7 defensive rebounds per game (#43 in NCAA) and a defensive rebounding rate of 77.8% (#21 in the NCAA).

Analysis

Keeping above numbers in mind we wanted to see just how much better both teams have been compared to their competition in the rebounding department.

The graphs below show the delta between the team’s rebounds and their opponents rebounds per game. They both crush their competition.

Here is the key point: they are both average +7 rebounds per game. In the game tonight — something has to give.

The next analysis looks at where these rebounds are coming from? Let’s look at defensive rebounds and the underlying player contribution. For this analysis we looked at each player’s contribution for both offensive and defensive rebounds and then ranked them based in relation to their team’s overall respective rebounds.

You can see that Ohio State on average has 1 player that averages 25% of the team’s overall defensive rebounds, with a nice slow decay. Both teams have meaningful contribution across their players — excellent balance.

Let’s look at the offensive side of the coin. On the offensive boards Gonzaga has a slight advantage with more player in the mix e.g. more balanced.

Prediction

Net-net as stated above something has to give. This is going to be battle. We expect to see a combined 18 offensive rebounds. This will be a critical aspect to the match up if both teams shoot at their recent rates and bring their strong defensive games underneath the glass.