I can definitely see Sarah joining the triple/double club this coming season, especially with the addition of Serah as a target for assists. On the other hand, I believe that same addition of Serah Williams will have a real impact on SS rebound totals. If Serah Williams and SS share at least 20 minutes of courttime per game, I doubt SS will avg 10/reb/game-which is fine with me
because there are only so many rebounds to go around with 2 monster rebounders on the floor at the same time!!! My goodness, what a year we have coming up
Interesting thought... aaaand now I'm going down the rabbit hole.
What exactly affects the distribution of rebounds in a game? Sarah gets a lot of them, and in doing so, she's competing against the other team, but also in some sense she's taking rebounds from her teammates. I remember thinking about Nika's rebounds over the last few years, and she got them by hustling. But she also sometimes got them at the expense of Aaliyah or Dorka or Ice. I'm thinking of balls she leaps for that would otherwise have been corralled by one of the bigs. At the time, I suspected this might account for 1 or 2 of her total boards. In Sarah's case, I think she loses fewer of her rebounds to teammates (like KK or Ash) than Jana or Ice do, and this is because of how good her hands are and how active her feet are. She boxes out well, but she also pursues more like a guard than big.
How many rebounds does UConn get in a game? Last season, we grabbed 1,480 boards in 40 total games, or 37/game while opponents averaged 31/game. The only team that significantly out rebounded us was USC. But otherwise, we out rebounded the teams usually thought to be rebounding powerhouses, like SC and OU. The "hustle" teams like Creighton tended to do better against in the rebounding comparison, and this is also probably why USC did so well. They hustle. UConn is unusual, I imagine, in being a hustling team and also a big team. In some sense, this makes USC maybe the perfect opponent for us, because that's what they are too. And this was reflected in the tournament, since they played us closer just in general than any other team.
FG% affects the total number of rebounds available. UConn led the nation in FG%. It's not unreasonable to think this would mean fewer offensive rebounds were available, and to expect that UConn's total rebounds would be lower. 37/game was 147th in the nation, which seems low for a nation championship winning team, but makes a bit more sense in combination with the FG%. The 146 teams that grabbed more rebounds than UConn would still probably have lost to them because of the rate at which they could score.
Sarah is a hustling big. If she's going to average 10 rebounds, she'll be competing with her teammates, Serah, Blanca, KK, Ash, Jana, Ice, Caroline, Morgan, Ayanna... to name just a few. If her totals aren't going to decline, her hustle factor may have to go up. There may be an arithmetic limit to the number of possible rebound opportunities, I suppose. But the hustle factor seems illimitable.
Sarah seemed to get more rebounds against tougher teams. This may mean her teammates were kept off the boards more effectively. It is probably also testimony to the old adage, when the going gets tough....
