Monday Tip-Off: I Love Assists, But I Also Love Rebounds

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some reflections on how I’m just as passionate about getting rebounds on the virtual hardwood as I am racking up assists.

I’ve spoken at length about my love of tallying assists in video games. It all began with MyCAREER in NBA 2K13, where my player – a shooting guard – was thrust into the role of starting point guard when Ty Lawson went down for the year with an injury. One of the dynamic goals challenged me to break Fat Lever’s team record for assists in a single game, and that was that. In future games, my MyPLAYER was a point guard, built to get dimes. This carried over into playing online with NLSC THRILLHO, as I relished setting up the guys to score.

However, assists aren’t the only statistical column that I enjoy filling up in basketball video games. I also really relish getting rebounds! There’s something so satisfying about snaring a board, whether I’m controlling all five players or I’m locked to my career mode avatar. Indeed, on the couple of occasions that I’ve created a big man instead of a playmaking point guard, I’ve switched my focus from dropping dimes to cleaning the glass. Mind you, given how averaging a triple-double in MyCAREER becomes a habit when you have the strategy down pat, my point guards grab a lot of boards as well. Whichever game and however I’m playing, I truly do love rebounds.

In fact, my love of rebounds long predates my affinity for assists. One of the major factors in me falling in love with basketball way back in 1996 – aside from it being a golden era in the NBA – was that my friends and I began hooping at school almost every day. Up until that point, I’d never really played basketball aside from shooting around in my backyard, and I wasn’t a particularly sporty person in general. As such, I was still learning the basics when we started playing. I remember a classmate showing me how to hold the ball to shoot jumpshots and layups, and teaching me to dribble using fingertips and wrist action instead of just slapping at it with my whole palm.

I’d develop those skills with time and practice, but during my early days of hitting the blacktop at school, I was definitely limited. I soon discovered that I was a pretty good leaper though, and I was also one of the taller kids in our year. To that end, blocking and in particular rebounding came somewhat naturally to me. As I kept playing and practicing, I began hitting more shots and even developed a little hook shot that I’d often bank in. I could always reliably grab rebounds though, and so that became “my thing” that I could take pride in. Even as my other skills developed, I wanted to be the person in our friend group who vacuumed up the most rebounds whenever we played.

It was a similar situation when I began playing competitive basketball in our local junior league a couple of years later. Although I wasn’t nearly as raw by that point, I was still going up against kids who’d been playing organised ball for several years; indeed, trying out for my school team shortly before that had been a very humbling experience! I needed to keep practicing and honing my skills, and to that end, I went scoreless in my very first league game. I did grab ten rebounds though, which I felt good about. Double digits in rebounds were the mark of all the great glass cleaners, and I thought if nothing else, I could end up being a Dennis Rodman type of player.

While I ended up being a more well-rounded player and even developed a three-point shot after an ankle injury on a dirty play temporarily made me nervous about driving and mixing it up in the paint, rebounding was still what I took the most pride in. I felt like I’d let my team down if I didn’t get at least ten boards. Not only did I want to grab every miss I could to give us more possessions, but again, that felt like the baseline for a solid glass-cleaning performance. I kept track of my stats for every game, and after becoming a more competent scorer, I felt a great sense of accomplishment when I finally averaged a double-double in points and rebounds over the course of a season.

Unsurprisingly, my enthusiasm for rebounds carried over to the virtual hardwood. Of course, looking back, I’d suggest that much of the satisfaction in snaring boards came from how difficult it could be in early basketball video games. Whenever I go back and play the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95 today, I’m reminded of just how challenging it is to get a double-double in points and rebounds with the great centres and power forwards of the era. Even when you’re playing on twelve-minute quarters, the high shooting percentages combined with long, unpredictable bounces off the rim make it tougher than it should be to secure rebounds with big men close to the basket.

NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 PC were both an improvement in that regard, but the boards still didn’t always come easy. Between blocks taking away opportunities for defensive rebounds, players being out of position, and an inability to effectively box out, you had to work hard on the glass if you wanted to get realistic numbers. During my Season in NBA Live 96 using my 1998 roster update, Dennis Rodman ended up trailing Charles Barkley in the race for the rebounding crown. In order to get Rodman to finish the year as the league leader, I took advantage of the lack of illegal defense and parked him under the rim for a better chance at grabbing every miss. It worked.

Rebounding remained hit-and-miss in basketball video games into the early 2000s. NBA Live 2001 and NBA Live 2002 both had issues with too many offensive boards, because jumping for rebounds tended to punish defenders more than the attacking team. NBA Live wasn’t the only game with such issues, of course. If you revisit other sim titles from the late 90s and early 2000s, you’ll discover that in many of them most rebounds are caught flat-footed, or scooped up off the floor. As improvements were made to collisions and physicality, as well as the players’ ability to track the ball and reach for it, battling the CPU and other gamers for rebounds became much more fun.

That’s not to say that every game since the early 2000s has nailed rebounding. There are titles with very obvious ball warping that makes boards feel canned and contrived. Badges and other boosts can also have a negative impact. Sometimes the mechanics that help the ball find its way into players’ hands kick in when you don’t want them to. NBA 2K9 is a good example of this, as jumping for rebounds sometimes causes them to be magnetically pulled off the rim, leading to erroneous goaltending and offensive interference calls. Apart from that though, the rebounding mechanics are superb, and far more effective and satisfying than the more primitive games that I grew up with.

When rebounding is generally solid, players end up getting their expected numbers and having big games on the glass quite organically. Referring once again to NBA 2K9, while the occasional cheap infraction can occur, you can also be a beast on the boards. Dee and I had a game where Joakim Noah had 20 rebounds, and it happened naturally through effort. Because rebounds aren’t as easy to manufacture as points and assists – the misses have to be there, after all – it’s always exciting when you can have a player snag a bunch of them. Scoring is fun, but it’s an achievement when you can channel Rodman, Charles Barkley, Wilt Chamberlain, or Bill Russell on the boards.

There’s something unselfish about rebounding that I really enjoy. In fact, it could be argued that rebounds are the least selfish stat to pad. Assists are obviously up there – and again, I do love racking them up – but it’s still possible to be selfish even while you’re dishing the rock. You can hog the ball while looking to make the assist pass, rather than keeping it moving in the flow of the offense. You can freeze out players who “waste” your passes, or pass up shots to hand off a “grenade” to a teammate as the shot clock ticks down. Every rebound gives your team another possession and keeps it out of your opponents’ hands, so grabbing a lot of boards is rarely costly.

I say rarely, because you can certainly hurt your team if you’re hunting for rebounds too eagerly. I’ll admit that in the pursuit of triple-doubles in MyCAREER, I’ve ended up wandering on defense so that I’m in position to rush in for a rebound. While this is an effective strategy for padding your rebounding numbers and getting triple-doubles, it does give up some open shots from time to time! In that sense, rebounding can have selfish motivations, potentially making the pursuit of them disadvantageous. Even so, one might suggest that it’s the only stat where being somewhat selfish and obsessed with your numbers can still help the team, as you’re nevertheless doing the dirty work.

And of course, rebounds are often part of exciting sequences. It’s satisfying to end a defensive possession by forcing the miss and getting the board, particularly when you can turn it into a fast break. Rising up for a putback dunk can make for a spectacular highlight. Even just overpowering the defense to successfully crash the offensive boards, or sneaking in to snag a rebound and score a timely second chance bucket, can be thrilling. Sure, your average rebound isn’t going to be as exciting as a huge poster dunk, wild alley-oop, crazy circus shot, swish from downtown, or a clutch dagger. A board will often set up those finishes though, making it an important part of the play.

Beyond their importance to a team’s success and the way that their mechanics in video games have improved however, my passion for rebounds runs deep. After all, they were the first aspect of basketball that I was good at when I began playing, and so they’ll always have a special place in my hoops-loving heart. There are many things I do in video games that I simply can’t in real life, from big dunks to dazzling streetball moves. It’s a blast living out my fantasies there, but because cleaning up on the glass actually reflects how I used to play basketball, there’s a connection that makes it extra satisfying. Video games made me love assists, but rebounds will always be “my” stat.

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