I posted this graphic in the game thread in response to a question about our offensive rebounding as a team, and in doing so I noticed that for all the stick Kornet gets here about his rebounding, etc. his numbers in relation to others in his position aren't as bad as I thought they would be. This isn't a post to say that Luke is actually the second coming of Shaq, I just found it interesting that for all the hate he gets he is actually in the 48th percentile of centers when it comes to making offensive rebounds, and in the 43rd percentile in terms of defensive rebounds.
In context, that 48th percentile for offensive rebounds is a higher ranking than Aaron Gordon, Nikola Vucevic or Precious Achiewa:
And the 43rd percentile for defensive rebounds is higher than Gallo, Ojongwu or his teammate Al Horford:
Worse that the median for sure but acceptable I guess for a third string center? Especially when you look at him being in the top 25% of centers in terms of blocks. We all know Joe Mazz is a stats nerd, maybe that's why he keeps Luke around 
And yes, you can add asterisks to any stat, it's possible that Luke just happens to be on the court when there are terrible rebounders on the other team, while the other guys are going up against tougher rebounders, but you would expect all that to smooth out over the course of a season so it will be interesting to see where he ends up. Then you add the fact that he's costing the team $2m, I can see why Brad and Joe might see value in him. Once Queta gets more reps we'll see where he falls in terms of his relative production.
Why does it matter if he’s better at offensive rebounding than Gordon, Vooch or Precious?
Previous is 6’8”, half a foot shorter than Luke and has a .271 3 point rate. Gordon us 6’8” and has a .200 3pr. Vooch is 4 inches shorter and has. .231 3pr.
Kornet is 7’2” with a 3pr of .000. He is never by the 3 point line and always by the rim. You are comparing giant apples to little oranges.
Outrebounding some hand picked power forward types under 6’11” doesn’t mean much. Are these guys playing drop coverage at the center position for their team, always within 5 feet of the rim?
Just to clarify, I'm not cherrypicking anything. Those percentile stats by Cleaning the Glass use game data to rank every player in a number of categories, from highest to lowest, filtered by position. The position groupings they use are as follows:
So by that criteria Luke is classified as a big. Then it's just ranking them by the ORfg%, which is the percentage of missed field goals by his team that the player rebounded. Below is the top 20 in that list (the players in the 78th to 100th percentile of bigs). All the usual suspects up there.
Then if you look to see where Luke is, in the 48th percentile:
Those names - Aaron, Vuc and Precious - just happened to the the players immediately after him in the rankings. In the interest of space I didn't publish the entire ranking but here it is above.
Unfortunately the website doesn't allow me to filter by height or whether the competitive set is a stretch big that sits on the perimeter more often than not - those are all part of the "asterisks" that I mentioned initially. Being able to filter by those to narrow down the comparison to those players who play exactly like Luke does, would give us a better idea of where he truly sits. I'm sure a premium subscription would unlock those filters for use, and I'm sure each individual team has access to that level of detail via Second Spectrum data but that costs thousands of dollars a month that I unfortunately can't justify as a hobby
Once Queta and Stevens have enough data of their own to be included in these rankings I will be curious to see whether the actual data supports the eye test.
