Reese's Puffs - How Angel Reese's Terrible Shooting Pumps Air Into Her Rebounding Stats
Jordan Johnson. Getty Images.Drive by WNBA blog for me today. I'm going full spreadsheet take mode here as I admittedly don't watch WNBA, but that doesn't mean I can't see how people's brains are breaking over how to evaluate Angel Reese's rebounding game. Especially now that she set the single-season rebounding record in her rookie year. On the surface, that's pretty impressive. Some will even say this puts her in the Rookie of the Year discussion. But others claim Reese's rebound tallies are the product of some combination of stat padding or just being an awful shooter.
So let's get to the bottom of this. Here's Reese's take.
We set off to answer this question. Are the candy-sponsored rookie's rebounds just Reese's Puffs in the stat line if she can't handle putting the ball in a Reese's Cup? I used play-by-play data curated from Wehoop in attempt to tease out to what degree this might be true.
Hope you're hungry for breakfast.
Boston Globe. Getty Images.Let's first confirm Angel Reese in in-fact a poor shooter relative to her peers. The play-by-play description in the data is a bit inconsistent in when it does or doesn't include length of a shot, but I did the work to identify all shots either listed under 5-feet or as a layup in order to pull those with the most Shaq range attempts in 2024 along with field goal percentage:
I included the top-12 here instead of perhaps a top-ten so it didn't look like I was trying to hide DiJonai Carrington and Skylar Diggins-Smith - the only players with a lower percentage - from the list. But still. I think we can all agree there's some efficiency issues here for Angel Reese.
But let's talk rebounding. That's what we're here for anyway.
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Let's start here with a list of the players with the most offensive rebounds immediately followed by a shot. Reese towers over the competition with 25 more shot attempts after an offensive rebound. I could see this being a first blush stat some people might be overly impressed with despite Reese's paltry efficiency of such shots after an offensive rebound.
In Reese's defense, maybe she's cleaning up the glass for her teammates and keeping the possessions alive. Even though the efficiency lags she's at least giving the team more chances than anyone else. That's a decent theory until you run a list of players with the most self-rebounds and find she has 28 more than anyone else.
So yeah. Angel Reese isn't cleaning up after her teammates. She's cleaning up after herself. 53 self-rebounds is the most in a single season since at least 2002 when such data was publicly tracked. And the season isn't even over yet (although to be fair there were less games in most of the prior years). But if you take away these self-created rebounds from everyone (not just Reese) it's actually Aliyah Boston who's the more impressive lady of the boards. Not to mention her 71% efficiency compared to Reese's 57%.
In conclusion, I think it's well agreed Angel Reese is a great rebounder. Even after you adjust for her shenanigans of terrible shooting to fuel arbitrary double-double streaks, she's still one of the top rebounders in the game in just her rookie season. But it sure seems to me Angel Reese is Dennis Rodman without the self-awareness of being a poor shooter.
So let this be a quick lesson to box score truthers who see Angel Reese dominating in rebounds and getting all these double-doubles as if these numbers are the creamy rich peanut butter of a Reese's Cup.
There's a lot of air in those stats.