Offensive rebounding came back and defenses are late

A decade of sending everyone back on the shot left a gap, and the teams crashing again are collecting easy points out of it.

For years the orthodoxy was settled. Do not crash. Get back. A second-chance point is worth less than the transition bucket you concede chasing it, so send four to half court and let the big fight for whatever he can get on his own.

That was probably correct when it was formulated. It is not obviously correct now, and the reason is that everybody adopted it.

When one team crashes the glass against a league that mostly does not, the arithmetic changes. Defenses have spent years drilling immediate retreat, which means their box-out discipline has quietly rotted. Watch closely on a long three: the two players on the weak side are not turning to find a body, they are turning to run. Send one extra crasher into that and you get an uncontested tap-out to the top of the key roughly as often as you get nothing.

And the shot profile of the modern game helps. Threes produce long, unpredictable rebounds that carom out past the free throw line, exactly the zone nobody boxes out because nobody was standing there. The player who benefits is not the centre wrestling under the rim. It is a wing crashing from the wing into open floor.

The risk is real and should not be waved away. Send two and you can get burned. But the accounting people do is usually sloppy, because they compare second-chance points against transition points allowed without pricing the possession that ends in a reset. An offensive rebound at eleven seconds does not just produce a putback. It produces a fresh fourteen on the shot clock against a defense that has already used its rotation, and those are some of the best possessions in the sport.

The practical rule I would want is conditional rather than absolute. Crash off a corner three, because the rebound tends to go long to the opposite side and your wing is closer than their guard. Do not crash off a drive that pulled everybody into the paint, because the floor is already unbalanced and the outlet will kill you.

Mostly, though, I want the decision made per shot rather than as team policy. Blanket rules are for teams that have not watched their own tape. Somebody is going to build an entire identity out of this and everyone will call it innovative, when it is really just the game unlearning a rule it applied too broadly.