Who is at Fault, Part II

I'm going to continue an earlier entry which asks the question "Is Coach Meadors the reason why the Dream are doing so badly? Or is it the team that's not up to par?

Offensive rebounds. Bill Simmons's uses an offensive rebound differential stat:

Your offensive rebounds - Your opponent's offensive rebounds.

I consider that stat just a bit suspect. Offensive rebounds are all about second chance points. However, your offensive rebounds are basically how many second chances you get at a shot. When you subtract the opponent's offensive rebounds, you're taken away your opponent's chances. I don't quite understand why these two should combine, except as a measure of general rebounding aggressiveness or toughness.

Here are the results:


Off Reb/Game
Off Reb of Opp/Game
Difference
Detroit
12.8
9.1
3.7
Houston
11.8
9.4
2.4
Washington
9.5
8.4
1.1
Connecticut
11.8
11.3
0.5
Sacramento
11.8
11.3
0.5
New York
10.2
10.2
0
Indiana
9.9
10.1
-0.2
Minnesota
10.2
10.8
-0.6
Los Angeles
11.1
12
-0.9
Seattle
10.5
11.4
-0.9
Chicago
10
11
-1
San Antonio
9.5
10.7
-1.2
Phoenix
10.8
12.1
-1.3
Atlanta
10.5
12.9
-2.4

The first smell test for a statistic is "do the results jibe with my common sense?" In this case, they do. We'd expect Detroit to be at the top of the table and Atlanta at the bottom. What I didn't suspect is how far down along the bottom we'd be. Note the big jump between the Mercury's difference (-1.3) and the Dream's (-2.4)

However, much of this isn't Meadors's fault. We've had problems for several reasons -- Erika DeSouza is injured. Izi Castro Marques was off playing for the Brazilian team. There have been gaps in the rebounding game due to the fact that the players we expected to be there weren't there.

Some might point to the Ann Wauters/Camille Little trade as a mistake. However,

1) There was no guarantee that Wauters would play. She's sat out seasons before. She declined to play for the Liberty. She's European, and she can simply pick and choose what WNBA team she wants to play for. Do we have any guarantee that she would have even reported to the Dream?

2) We get a 2009 first round draft choice. That's going to help build the team.

I think even with the bad rebounding, we have to give Coach Meadors a pass. If the rebounding stays bad...? There are still over 20 more games to play. Give it time.