Six months ago, Derrick White allowed the Celtics to snatch a Game 7 against the Heat in the conference final. Placed in the “corner”, the Boston leader/back threw himself for the offensive rebound to put Marcus Smart’s miss back in the circle and allow Boston to believe in a miracle.
What we forgot is that, a few possessions before, Jaylen Brown had also recovered a major offensive rebound, also diving from the “corner” to recover a miss from Jayson Tatum.
“What happens when we don’t shoot well is that guys buy into this idea of corner crashing opportunities, and that gives us a chance.” reacted Joe Mazzulla at a press conference. “These are important things. We already had some in Game 5, and we had even more tonight. »
Defensive withdrawal above all
At Utah, his former friend on the Celtics bench, Will Hardy, also mentioned this “corner crashing”, or the fact that players placed in the corners rush for the offensive rebound.
This is because the offensive rebound was more or less “abandoned” with the explosion of the 3-point shot in the NBA. With the development of “small ball” and more and more players placed behind the 3-point line in attack, going for the offensive rebound was not really a priority for coaches, who mainly focused on the withdrawal defensive, to prevent players from finding themselves in the “No Man’s Land” or the “Zone of Death”. Because playing the offensive rebound too much, this allowed the opponents to play more counterattacks.
Which meant that if teams recovered 33.5% of their missed shots at the end of the 1970s, this rate had fallen to 22.2% in 2020, the year when offensive rebounding was the most neglected.
Except that since then, this rate has increased, and this season it is 24.7%. And it is above all a global trend.
In 2019, Jim Boylen, then head of the Chicago Bulls (he will be fired at the end of the season…) also explained that he wanted to experiment the “corner crashing” in Summer League.
“I’m using Summer League to experiment with the things I want to do and try. One thing we haven’t tried yet, but the advanced stats say we should do, is the corner crash, meaning we send a different player to the offensive rebound. We will test it this summer. »
An option for weak shooters
Now, the teams have passed the experimentation phase and “corner-crashing” has established itself in the NBA, as shown by Mo Dakhil in a very interesting article on The Athletic.
Behind Mitchell Robinson (78 offensive rebounds since the start of the season), the best offensive rebounder in the league is a winger, rookie Ausar Thompson, who has already captured 52 offensive rebounds from the height of 2m01. The Pistons player has a real sense of rebounding, and he uses corner crashing wonderfully.
However, he is not the only one since at the Lakers, Jarred Vanderbilt and Rui Hachimura are specialists, just like Scottie Barnes at the Raptors or even Torrey Craig at the Bulls.
This is because “corner crashing” has several advantages. Already, the players who are in the corners in attack are not the best placed to ensure the defensive withdrawal, and if they are athletic and have a good sense of rebound, ask them to try to recover the failures of their teammates is ultimately more useful than asking them to ensure the defensive withdrawal. Especially since even if they do not recover the rebound, they can hinder the restart.
And then, it’s not just a rebound strategy. For weak shooters (Ausar Thompson, for example, only has a 14% 3-point success rate…), cutting from the “corner” when a teammate penetrates is also a way of being more useful offensively even before the shots are taken, in particular by offering a pass option towards the circle, in order also to mobilize a defender who would otherwise tend to ignore them to come to the aid and thus densify the defense under the circle.
