Chairmen of the Boards

Evaluating the greatest rebounders in NBA history.

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As I noted two weeks ago in my post on the progression of single-season records, Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell own the top 18 rebound totals in league history, with Chamberlain claiming the first seven spots.

But that doesn’t necessarily make them the greatest rebounders of all time. Rebounds can’t be recorded without missed shots, and there were a lot more missed shots in Chamberlain and Russell’s era.

Take the 1960-61 season as an example. On average, teams combined to miss 127.4 shots per 48 minutes, dwarfing last season’s corresponding figure of 92.9. To put that another way, teams would have had to play almost a 66-minute game in 2023-24 in order to reach the same number of misses as a 48-minute game in 1960-61.

As such, there were an average of 128.3 rebounds per 48 minutes in 1960-61, a whopping 48% higher than last season’s figure of 86.6. Roughly speaking, 1,000 rebounds in 1960-61 would be the equivalent to about 675 rebounds in today’s game.

One way to adjust for opportunities is to calculate a player’s rebound rate, or rebounds per 100 opportunities. However, this statistic requires both team and opponent totals, and the NBA did not begin to track the latter until the 1970-71 season.

Opponent statistics could be calculated from complete game-by-game team logs, of course, but unfortunately I don’t have 100% coverage in my database for the time period in which we would need them.

That said, I do have rebound figures for almost two-thirds of the games for the 1950-51 through 1969-70 seasons, so here’s what I did to get rebound opportunities in those seasons:

• If I had rebounds recorded for a given game, then I obviously used them.

• If I did not have rebounds recorded for a given game, then I used each team’s season statistics to estimate them.

• After doing this for each game in a given season, I found the sum of team and opponent rebounds (either actual or estimated) to get a season total for rebound opportunities.

For example, I have rebounds recorded for 74 of the Boston Celtics’ 82 games in the 1968-69 season, Russell’s final campaign:

• In the 74 games with rebounds, my total is 8,676.

• In the eight games without rebounds, my estimated figure is 926.

• Summing those two values yields an estimated 9,602 rebound opportunities.

Russell played 3,291 minutes that season, or 83.0% of all possible minutes. He snagged 1,484 rebounds out of an estimated 7,970* available boards. Thus Russell’s rebound rate is 1,484 divided by 7,970, times 100, which is 18.6.

* This is 83.0% of 9,602.

Okay, now let’s get to some results. Here are the 10 highest rebound rates in a single season, requiring a minimum of 50% of all possible minutes (about 2,000 minutes in an 82-game season):

1. Dennis Rodman, 26.6 (1995-96)

2. DeAndre Jordan, 26.5 (2017-18)

3. Andre Drummond, 26.2 (2017-18)

4. Rodman, 26.2 (1991-92)

5. Clint Capela, 26.1 (2020-21)

6. Drummond, 26.0 (2019-20)

7. Rodman, 26.0 (1992-93)

8. Rodman, 25.7 (1993-94)

9. Drummond, 25.4 (2018-19)

10. Drummond, 25.2 (2016-17)

This list is dominated by Dennis Rodman and Andre Drummond, each of whom places four seasons in the top 10. Note that all of the seasons above occurred in the 30-year period from 1991-92 through 2020-21.

Chamberlain’s record-setting 1960-61 season comes in way down the list, at number 126 with a rebound rate of 20.2. His top season by this measure is actually 1966-67, which ranks 78th at 21.1. Russell’s 1963-64 season is his best, placing 64th at 21.5.

Here’s what we get if we create a career list using a minimum of 15,000 minutes:

1. Andre Drummond, 25.1

2. Dennis Rodman, 23.4

3. Clint Capela, 22.0

4. Reggie Evans, 21.9

5. Rudy Gobert, 21.6

6. DeAndre Jordan, 21.6

7. Dwight Howard, 21.1

8. Jonas Valanciunas, 20.6

9. Bill Russell, 20.2

10. Wilt Chamberlain, 20.1

Once again, Drummond and Rodman separate themselves from their peers. Several of the players listed above are still playing and will likely see their career rates decrease over time. Here’s the top 10 if we remove active players:

1. Dennis Rodman, 23.4

2. Reggie Evans, 21.9

3. Dwight Howard, 21.1

4. Bill Russell, 20.2

5. Wilt Chamberlain, 20.1

6. Enes Freedom, 19.9

7. Moses Malone, 19.8

8. Larry Smith, 19.3

9. Marcus Camby, 19.2

10. Dikembe Mutombo, 19.1

Of course, using rebound rate does not fully take into account Chamberlain and Russell’s amazing durability. Chamberlain (45.8 MPG) and Russell (42.3 MPG) rank first and second, respectively, on the NBA’s career list for minutes per game.

To account for playing time along with rebounding prowess, I adjusted each player’s season total to an environment in which there are 1.8 rebounds per minute (last season’s rate). It’s a relatively easy process:

• Multiply the player’s minutes by 1.8.

• Divide the player’s rebound rate by 100.

• Find the product of the two figures above.

Doing this for Chamberlain in 1960-61:

• Chamberlain played 3,773 minutes. Multiplying by 1.8 gives us 6,791.4.

• Chamberlain’s rebound rate is 20.2. Dividing by 100 gives us 0.202.

• The product of 6,791.4 and 0.202 is 1,372.

This adjusted total ranks ninth all time, and is actually Chamberlain’s sixth-best season:

1. Dennis Rodman, 1,556 (1991-92)

2. Moses Malone, 1,416 (1978-79)

3. Wilt Chamberlain, 1,397 (1967-68)

4. Chamberlain, 1,396 (1962-63)

5. Chamberlain, 1,396 (1966-67)

6. Rodman, 1,385 (1993-94)

7. Chamberlain, 1,377 (1961-62)

8. Chamberlain, 1,375 (1965-66)

9. Chamberlain, 1,372 (1960-61)

10. Bill Russell, 1,351 (1963-64)

Rodman’s incredible 1991-92 season comes in first, a campaign in which he averaged 18.7 RPG. Rodman is the last player to record a 1,500-rebound season (his actual total was 1,530 boards in 1991-92), and he’s the only player to record at least 1,000 defensive rebounds and 500 offensive rebounds in a season since the NBA began tracking those two statistics in 1973-74.

Yes, Chamberlain still dominates this list, taking six of the top nine spots. But that’s not all that surprising given Chamberlain was a great rebounder who rarely came out of the game.

Now let’s look at some career results. First, totals, with the player’s career rank before adjustment listed in parentheses:

1. Wilt Chamberlain, 17,290 (1st)

2. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 16,188 (3rd)

3. Moses Malone, 16,085 (5th)

4. Karl Malone, 15,758 (7th)

5. Tim Duncan, 15,698 (6th)

6. Kevin Garnett, 15,422 (9th)

7. Dwight Howard, 14,968 (10th)

8. Bill Russell, 14,813 (2nd)

9. Robert Parish, 14,705 (8th)

10. Elvin Hayes, 14,044 (4th)

With or without an adjustment, Chamberlain ranks first, but the gap between him and the rest of the field shrinks considerably after taking opportunities into account. Note that while the players in the top 10 remain the same, the deck has been shuffled.

Second, let’s consider per-game rates, using a minimum of 400 games played. The ordinal in parentheses is where the player ranked prior to adjustment:

1. Wilt Chamberlain, 16.5 (1st)

2. Bill Russell, 15.4 (2nd)

3. Dennis Rodman, 13.4 (10th)

4. Andre Drummond, 12.3 (14th)

5. Jerry Lucas, 12.2 (4th)

6. Moses Malone, 12.1 (15th)

7. Bob Pettit, 12.1 (3rd)

8. Dwight Howard, 12.1 (19th)

9. Charles Barkley, 12.0 (21st)

10. Wes Unseld, 12.0 (6th)

Chamberlain and Russell hold on to the top two spots, but their advantage over Rodman has been significantly reduced (it was more than 9.0 RPG prior to adjustment).

Four of the players on the career list above — Drummond, Moses Malone, Howard, and Charles Barkley — sat outside the top 10 prior to adjustment. Here are the players they displaced:

• Nate Thurmond (fifth to 13th)

• Walt Bellamy (seventh to 19th)

• Dave Cowens (eighth to 11th)

• Elgin Baylor (ninth to 46th)

So who’s the greatest rebounder of all time? Going purely by volume, it has to be Chamberlain, with or without adjustment. But taking everything into consideration, my choice would be Rodman, the only player to rank in the top three on the career lists for both rebound rate (second) and adjusted rebounds per game (third). Rodman certainly had his flaws — both on and off the court — but his ability to retrieve missed shots was second to none.