Here is another thing that nobody is talking about but may kill us: defensive rebounding in the crunch.
The common retort about the eyeball test saying that we’re bad at rebounding is the stats that show that we’re a good rebounding team. But this is too misleading. In the aggregate, we do fine over 48 minutes in terms of total rebounds. But in the crunch it’s a different story. I mentioned above that Crowder defensively became Bojan. Jae and Ricky combined for 18% TRB% while with us. Last year Conley and Bojan combined for 13%. But even this doesn’t really matter because we still struggled with this same issue then, but we’ve exacerbated it this year for the following couple of reasons:
1. Crowder wasn’t a great rebounder by any stretch of the imagination, but Bojan is worse. Same for Rubio and Conley.
2. The idea in the crunch is that Rudy has to step up and apply pressure and show force when the ball-handler moves into the lane. He is good at this, but it takes him out of rebounding position, and so if/when they miss, which is likely because of his defense, there are a lot of opportunities for the other team to grab offensive rebounds. Crowder couldn’t keep them off the boards, but Bojan is worse.
3. Bojan and Conley are worse defenders than Ricky and Jae. This forces more pressure on Rudy to contest and clean up, leading to more problems in #2 and less ability to actual close the possession without the other team scoring. The other problem is the adjustments that the rest of the league has already made on us, knowing that once Rudy comes out to contest, the rim is open season for anyone else.
When Favors plays with Gobert, it alleviates this problem, because Rudy is able to contest freely without having to worry about surrendering the rim for an alley-oop and doesn’t have to worry about not having backup on the glass. This will help us during the first 42 minutes of the game, but also won’t be that pressing because Rudy won’t have to be as aggressively contesting as he does in crunch time. Favors won’t be playing much crunch, and even so doing imposes its own challenges.
That would be one advantage of a rebounding 4 like a Kevin Love. But, more importantly, would have been a nice role for a Christian Wood.
This is a problem we will still have. It’s not an issue we’ve addressed, and it’s not really an issue that my roster above with OPJ addresses. But this is a weakness the league has increasingly exploited, and all it really takes a a 6’4” hustle guy to know that he just needs to get in there for a putback once Rudy contests in the lane.
Rudy can work all kinds of defensive miracles, but if we give up the putback then it’s all for naught and our entire defensive strategy is just flashy but ineffective. The funny thing is that 12 years ago some people here (Sloanfeld?) would argue that Boozer wasn’t a bad defender because of his defensive rebounds, and how defensive rebounds were a measure of defense because they complete the defensive possession. It really is amazing, ironic, and karma-laden, that our defensive woes currently are indeed in large part due to not being able to “complete” that defensive possession with a defensive rebound.
Boozer FTW!
