The offensive rebounder bends a defence as hard as any shooter

A big man who cannot shoot still moves two defenders, and nobody has built a decent way to credit him for it.

A centre who has never made a three in his life still moves two defenders at once. He does it by standing near the rim while a shot goes up.

That is not a small thing, and the way we discuss floor spacing treats it as if it were. The argument goes that a non shooting big clogs the paint, so the defence ignores him and the offence effectively plays four on five. Sometimes true. But watch what happens on the shot itself. The moment the ball leaves a hand, his defender has to find him and put a body on him, and so does whichever help defender is closest, because a good offensive rebounder against one box out is a coin flip and against nobody is a layup. Two men are now committed to a player who never touched the ball.

The effect is real but it lands where nobody measures well. It shows up as second chance points, credited to whoever scores. It shows up as fouls drawn on the glass, which look like free throw attempts. It shows up most of all as a defence that cannot leak out and run, because two of its five are still under the rim when the rebound is finally secured, and I think that suppressed transition offence is the most underrated defensive contribution in the sport.

You can see it best in the negative. Teams that go small and send everyone back on the shot get more stops in transition and give up more of the offensive glass. That is a trade, not an upgrade, and it is presented as an upgrade constantly.

Here is where I part company with the analytics consensus. The standard line is that offensive rebounding is a low value pursuit because the expected points of a putback rarely justify the transition risk. That maths is fine in the aggregate and useless in the specific. It assumes the rebounder is equally likely to get the ball whoever he is. He is not. One player crashing changes the odds enough to flip the calculation, and the same crash by a mediocre rebounder does not.

So the rule should not be crash or do not crash. It should be that man crashes, always, and the other four do not. Most teams still coach it as a team habit rather than an individual licence, and it costs them games they never realise they lost.