Where Does Lance Stephenson Rank Among Greatest Rebounding Guards?

Lance Stephenson's tenure with the Charlotte Hornets has gotten off to a rough start on the offensive end, as he's failed to mesh with his new teammates and thrive in Steve Clifford's offense, which is markedly different from the one run by Frank Vogel and the Indiana Pacers. 

The shooting guard fondly known as Born Ready has averaged only 9.5 points per game on 37.8 percent shooting from the field through his first 11 appearances, and it's not as though his work from beyond the arc has aided the cause. After all, Stephenson has taken 20 downtown attempts and connected on just five of them. 

This will surely improve as the season progresses, especially as Stephenson gets used to playing without the ball in his hands as often and becomes less reliant on high screens set for him on the wings. But even while he finds more iron than net, Stephenson is making history.

Though there's plenty of time left in the season for him to regress to more typical numbers, the 2-guard from Cincinnati is poised to assert himself as the greatest single-season rebounding guard in NBA history. 

That's not an exaggeration, even if players such as Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson have always been viewed as untouchable glass-cleaners thanks to their gaudy per-game averages. 

Let's start there. 

It's not as though great rebounding numbers are new for Stephenson, as he averaged an impressive 7.2 boards per game during his final season with the Pacers. He has a remarkable knack for reading the ball off the rim, and it doesn't hurt that he sometimes likes padding his numbers by thieving an easy rebound from one of his teammates. But in 2014-15, he's taken things to a new level. 

After 11 outings, Stephenson is averaging a jaw-dropping 9.2 rebounds per game, a number that positions him among the elite at any position, much less among guards. This isn't the result of one fluke performance, as that average may actually be misleadingly low: 

Stephenson has consistently put up impressive totals, even breaking into double figures in four consecutive games at one point. The aberration came against the Golden State Warriors. In that game, he was held without a single rebound for the first time since April 4, 2013, when he produced a goose egg in a blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. 

If we strike the exception from the record, Stephenson would be averaging an even more impressive 10.1 rebounds per game. But we can't do that, since he did throw up a zero, so we're left looking at how 9.2 stacks up against the best per-game averages from guards throughout all of NBA history: 

Case closed, right? 

Well, not exactly. While Stephenson is far from the top of the per-game leaderboard, that's not the most telling number we have at our disposal. After all, some players have far more opportunities than others to collect rebounds based on pace of play and number of missed shots forced. 

Which player is more impressive? 

• Player A: Grabs 10 rebounds per game while on a team that sprints at all times but is terrible at shooting and forces a lot of misses. 
• Player B: Grabs 10 rebounds per game while on a team that slows everything down, shoots at high percentages and can't play defense. 

Their per-game totals are even, but Player B should be far more impressive because he'll have fewer opportunities. That's where total rebounding percentage comes into play, as it shows the percentage of rebounds a player grabs out of the ones that are available while he's on the floor. It takes both pace and team ability out of the equation. And here's why that's so remarkably important. 

In 1951-52, the first time the NBA tracked rebounds, the average team pulled in 54.52 rebounds per game. This season, that number has dropped to 40.36. In fact, here's how the average number of rebounds per game has progressed throughout all of league history: 

That alone makes for a pretty big difference. Shooting percentages have gone up as basketball history has progressed, and pace has simultaneously dropped rather significantly. 

Stephenson's 9.2 rebounds per game are essentially the equivalent of 16.3 during Robertson's record-setting season in 1961-62. They're the same as 9.9 during Magic Johnson's best rebounding campaign, so you can see how eras come into play. Still, we're not factoring in team-to-team variance, which total rebounding percentage will do: 

Playing on a team that operates at a sluggish pace during a year in which there have been fewer rebounds per game available than at any other point in NBA history, Stephenson jumps to the very top of the rankings. In fact, the top 10 as a whole looks quite different and features a number of players from this season, some of whom will regress to the mean as the sample size grows larger. 

Of course, there's one inherent flaw. 

Total rebounding percentage isn't calculated for seasons prior to the 1970s, which means a number of candidates from the original per-game list are no longer appearing, simply because we don't have the necessary data.

While we won't be able to account for team-by-team variance, let's take a look at how Stephenson would have fared on a league-average squad in each of the years that hosted the players who finished above him on the per-game leaderboard: 

It's not even close. In fact, the disparity is so large each season that it seems like a safe assumption neither Tom Gola nor Robertson would appear above Stephenson on the rankings for total rebounding percentages. 

Yes, that means the Charlotte 2-guard is indeed on pace for the greatest rebounding season by any guard in NBA history. 

He'll have his work cut out for him maintaining the numbers throughout the entirety of a grueling 82-game campaign, and he has plenty of years left before we can begin to claim he's one of the greatest backcourt rebounders over the course of his career. But everything looks promising right now.