Despite its struggles, there is indeed something that the NC State men’s basketball team is doing better than any of its conference foes — and it’s not missing shots, though they are third best by this metric.
Seven games into conference play, the Wolfpack is hitting the offensive glass more efficiently than any other ACC team. Its offensive rebounding rate of 41.2 percent indicates that rebounds are a near 50-50 proposition when the Pack is on offense — the national average is 30.1 percent while the ACC does a bit better at 32.5 percent.
This area has been the only in which the Wolfpack has improved during conference play. Before getting hot from the field in the team’s most recent two games, the post-scorers and three-point shooters alike had struggled to find their rhythms.
NC State is doing this in spite of rotating just three players at power forward and center. Sophomore Abdul-Malik Abu is leading the team in offensive rebounding rate and ranks 72nd nationally while junior Lennard Freeman ranks closed behind at 83rd.
Surprisingly, guard Cody Martin has contributed as much on the offensive glass as the Wolfpack’s third big man, BeeJay Anya. Both players average 2.0 offensive rebounds per game on the season and this is less a slight to Anya than it is an endorsement to Martin’s scrappy style of play.
A far more passive shooter than his brother Caleb, Cody has provided a big boost to the team with his efficient shot selection and hard-nosed defense, leading the team with 1.1 steals per game.
It’s no surprise then that the energetic sophomore ranks as the top shot-blocking guard in the ACC, but it’s curious that he outdoes both Abu and Freeman in this category. You’d usually expect post-players to far exceed the team’s guards in blocking shots, so what’s the source of this oddity?
Freeman isn’t known for his impressive vertical, but anyone that has watched Abu play knows how explosive he can be, whether he’s showing off his athleticism on an alley-oop or simply airing for a rebound.
It’s likely that the Wolfpack’s short rotation is the cause of Abu’s absent shot-blocking, for two reasons.
With little depth behind him, Abu and head coach Mark Gottfried know the importance of keeping him out of foul trouble, which is tough to do if you’re regularly whacking at and around your opponent’s hands and arms. This is part of the reason that Anya leads the team in foul rate.
Abu is also one of the Wolfpack’s go-to guys on offense. He takes shots at the second-highest rate on the team and, as previously mentioned, he works incredibly hard on the offensive glass. It’s possible that he simply doesn’t have enough energy at the other side of the court to continue on leaping about and expending his limited energy.
The solution is to run a deeper rotation in the frontcourt, something that Gottfried has been working hard to accomplish by his efforts on the recruiting trail. However, the Wolfpack has routinely struggled to bring in blue-chip big men (the transfer of Kyle Washington didn’t help either) and until it does, this is going to be a recurring issue.
All in all, the team is certainly getting a lot of production out of its three bigs in terms of offensive rebounding, but the stats don’t tell the whole story, as there are clearly trade-offs being made elsewhere.
