Team rebounding ... is critical in winning games. Just looking at the rebounding stats for the top individuals is like just looking at selected battles but ignoring the overall war. To evaluate the overall effectiveness of Patriot League teams on the boards, I looked at three different stats:

1. Percentage of offensive rebounds - what percentage of its own missed shots did each PL team get?

2. Percentage of defensive rebounds - what percentage of all missed opposition shots did each PL team grab?

3. Percentage of overall rebounds = the average of #'s 1 and 2 - this is a good measure of overall rebounding but not perfect, because it does not normalize the relativity between offensive and defensive rebounding opportunities.

Here are the PL rankings from league games in 2006:

Offensive Rebounding:

American / 36.1%
Bucknell / 35.9%
Navy / 35.0%
Colgate / 34.9%
Holy Cross / 34.3%
Lehigh / 28.6%
Lafayette / 25.5%
Army / 24.9%

Five teams are very close to each other in this category. The surprise team near the top is Navy, which may be partly attributable to its fast style of play causing more rebound situations when offensive players are not blocked out. It's also partly a tribute to Matt Fannin, who, even on one leg, led the PL in offensive rebounding. His extreme physical style and work rate paid dividends in this area.

Three teams - Lehigh, Lafayette, and Army - trail badly. The latter two squads are not a surprise since neither had a true big man or a big-time rebounder. It's a surprise to see Lehigh in this category since they had three big men and a couple of athletic forwards. To put the numbers in some perspective (although not balanced for "pace of play"), the smallish Navy squad had four players with 18 or more offensive rebounds in PL play; Lehigh had none.

Defensive Rebounding:

Holy Cross / 72.7%
Bucknell / 71.9%
American / 70.1%
Lehigh / 68.2%
Army / 66.6%
Colgate / 66.1%
Lafayette / 65.3%
Navy / 63.1%

Not too much of note here. The four dominant teams in the league standings are the top four in this category. Holy Cross was able to utilizethe balanced rebounding that was discussed in the earlier essay on individual rebounding. Navy, for all of its good numbers on the offensive glass, did a poor job at the other end. Undersized Army scrapped its way to an average performance on the defensive boards.

Total Rebounding:

Bucknell / 53.9%
Holy Cross / 53.5%
American / 53.1%
Colgate / 50.5%
Navy / 49.1%
Lehigh / 48.4%
Army / 45.8%
Lafayette / 45.4%

Putting the offensive and defensive caroms together, we see that the top two in this category are the two squads - Bucknell and Holy Cross - that finished 1-2 in the league, with first division American also near the top. Lehigh again does not fare well, considering the quality of the team and its size. Not surprisingly, the two small teams - Lafayette and Army - are at the bottom, trailing the field by a significant margin.

As I mentioned in the earlier rebounding essay, it will be interesting to see how Lehigh does on the boards this year missing its leading league rebounder, Mike Fischman, and also James Anderson, another leader in rebounds per minute. We'll see what their massive center Jason Mgreboff and the even taller John Gourlay can do now that last year's Mountain Hawk seniors are gone. Zahir Carrington, their freshman PF, might also get a chance to contribute in this area as well.

Both Bucknell and Holy Cross have to replace their rebounding leaders, Charles Lee and Kevin Hamilton, who were the top two rebounders in the league, thanks both to ability and to a heavy-duty amount of minutes. Both the Bison and the Crusaders have a plethora of returnees who can rebound, however, so I would expect both of them to again rank near the top when the 2006-07 rebounding stats are tallied.