[Bumped for Gettin' Your Wonk On. -KJ]

David Hess had a nice post about rebounding numbers above the average player and I figured I'd take a Big Ten-specific look using his methodology.

From David's own mou ... er, fingers:

So, here’s what I did. From team stat pages on kenpom.com, I see that centers account for 32.7% of offensive rebounds, and power forwards for 29.3%, with a steep drop off after that. I chose 30% as the share of team offensive rebounds for an average C/PF. Combining that with the average team OR% of 32.6% gives me a typical big man OR% of 9.8%. Subtracting that from a player’s actual OR% gives his OR%-above-average. I multiply that by 70.2 (the average number of total rebounds in a game this year according to StatSheet) to get his adjusted offensive rebounds above average, per 40 minutes. This number then gets multiplied by his percent of team minutes played, and I’m finally left with a value that represents the number of offensive rebounds the player gains you per game, over an average big man, assuming his typical playing time, in a game which has an NCAA-average number of rebounds available. I’ll call it OffReb+.

What it gives you is rebounds above-average, adjusted for minutes played. So, that's what I did, for both offensive and defensive rebounding, below the jump.

Before we start, it may be more appropriate to use a conference-specific rebounding rate rather than the D1 average like Hess used above. Maybe even BCS-Conference-specific would be best. I haven't done that, however and rolled with the numbers from above. However, I grabbed these off the conference leader board at KenPom, so the minimum requirement is at least 40% min% to qualify, hence the lack of some MSU big men. Because of this qualification there will be non-C/PF's included, but most of those guys don't rebound at a rate that would put them in the leader boards I'm showing below, so it's a non-factor.

The top 15:

Mike Tisdale's combining a very good OR% with a good amount of usage. Just behind him is Trevor Mbakwe and Jared Sullinger. The one that sticks out to me, though, is Sullinger's teammate Deshaun Thomas. Thomas' gives Ohio State great rebounding on the offensive glass in relatively few minutes. He's middle of the pack in fouls called per 40 minutes, so his minutes aren't foul-related and more rotation-related. Still, if OSU needs some offensive boards, Thomas is a good guy to turn to to grab them.

For the MSU focus, we're still top-50 in OR% as a team at 36.8%, but we're down a few ticks from what we're accustomed to in the last 5 years or so. Since 2007, our OR%'s have been 40.2%, 39.5%, 40.7%, 39.7, and 36.8% this year. Still very good, however.

Individually, only Draymond Green qualifies for the list and rates as positive. Delvon Roe was 19th at -0.63 and then you have to go down to Durrell Summers at 41st in conference play at -2.30 OR+.

If you include sub-40% min% players three of those four rate as above average. Freshman Adreian Payne comes in at +0.73 which would be 10th best mark in the conference. Derrick Nix is at +0.22 which would be 12th.

Now, I did the same thing for defensive rebounding. Basically, the average team rebounds around 67.4% of missed shots (is this right? I'm still a tempo-free novice) and I looked at the positional splits for defensive rebounding. I figured around 25% is a good rate for an average C/PF. To get the 'average' rate, I took 0.25*0.674 and got 0.1685 -- meaning the average defensive rebounding rate for a C/PF is around 16.9% (if I'm doing this correctly; I'm open to any and all errors i likely made in here). 

The top 15 in defensive rebounding above average are:

Jared Sullinger: Rebounding Machine. He's really separated himself from the field despite Mbakwe also posting very good numbers. Draymond's solidly in the third slot and Jon Leuer pops up in fourth. The top four are pretty isolated from the remaining eleven.

Other Spartans in the top twenty are Nix, Payne and Roe at 18-19-20 with DR+ numbers of 0.20, 0.11 and -0.02.

Finally, I totaled the OR+ and DR+ to get basically a Rebounding Above Average number (RB+). That table is below.

Just as you'd suspect by glancing at the other two tables, Sullinger and Mbakwe have really separated themselves above the rest of the conference. Tisdale and Draymond are close due to opposite stats -- Draymond excelling on the defensive end with Tisdale excelling on the offensive end. I hadn't intended to include sub-40% Min% guys but accidentally did. So that's why Payne pops up at 14th on this list.

Other MSU big men:  Nix is 16th at +0.42, Roe is 19th at -0.65, and Sherman is 23rd at -1.14 -- in fact, Sherman is actually behind Austin Thornton who clocks in at 20th with -0.87 RB+. He's been surprisingly good given his size and, uh, 'athleticism' on the offensive glass picking up +0.19 OR+ which would be 14th in the conference.