The Boston Celtics’ early season has gone more or less as we all expected: long stretches of casual dominance marred by a couple of slip-ups. But if there’s one bugaboo that’s consistently reared its ugly head, it’s rebounding problems on both sides of the floor.
The Celtics currently rank 17th in defensive rebounding and 20th in offensive rebounding after being just outside the top ten in both categories last season. Interestingly, though, they’ve only dropped from a 27.1% offensive rebounding rate (percentage of their misses that they recovered) last year to 26.3% this year, a minuscule change in absolute terms.