I would not trade Horford for Drummond straight up, never mind adding Rozier and two 1sts
You're greatly underestimating Horford's impact on both ends of the floor for this team. His outside shooting and passing skills, along with his leadership and defense are huge for us.
No I don't..he's a great role player at this point. 10.4 RPG in his prime. Guess when that was. When he was 26 years old. What is he avg now? 6.4 RPG.
This is just plain old lazy and incorrect statistical reference in order to try to prove your point. Horford was not in his prime during the 12-13 season, the season you’re referencing in your argument. In fact, he didn’t even make the all-star team. Regardless here are things you failed to extrapolate from his stats:
MPG
During the 12-13 season he played a career high 37.2 mpg, last year (I used last season as a reference since it provides a full year’s worth of data) he averaged 31.6 mpg. So while the raw stats show you’re correct and the 12-13 Horford was a better rebounder than last year 10.2 rpg to 7.4 rpg, what happens when those minutes are similar? Lucky for us there are per 36 stats and that immediately reduces the gap to just a 1.5 rpg differential - 9.9 to 8.4.
3PG & ORB
So I guess you’re right and Horford’s rebounding has diminished, right? Wrong! What you also failed to consider is that Horford is now a 3pt shooter and as result he’s playing much further from the rim, so thinking logically it’s likely his offensive rebound numbers suffer. Last season he had 226 3pt attempts, while just 6 during the 12-13 season. As a result, his per 36 of 2.5 offensive rebounds per game (ORB) were better during the 12-13 season, 2.5 to 1.6.
Conclusion
However, when you remove the ORB from the stats to account for the difference in his new perimeter oriented style, do you know the difference is between “peak” 12-13 Horford and last year’s all-star version? 0.5 rpg! That’s it! 7.3 defensive rebounds per game to 6.8. So let’s ease up the false narrative you’re using to try to help your weak argument.
Thank you.
To further point out the silliness of this take, consider that, while Detroit is currently ranked 2nd in defensive rebounding, grabbing 79.8% of defensive rebound chances, Boston is just a sliver back, in 4th place, grabbing 78.9% of all defensive rebound chances. Statistically, that difference is in the noise.
ALL the top 9 or so defensive rebounding teams are all crunched up close behind the top team (MIL, at 80.9%) and the fact is, anything we did to improve our rebounding on that end is going to hit the wall of diminishing returns. Those top teams (including BOS) are already vacuuming up all of their opponents missed shots that they reasonably have a real chance at. The other 20% are those that bounce out right back to an opposing team that you don't really have a chance to grab, regardless of how good you are at grabbing rebounds.
If you replaced Al Horford with Andre Drummond, yes, HE individually would probably post greater defensive rebounding numbers than Al Horford currently does. But the
team would likely not grab any significant difference more.
And on the other end of the court, offensive rebounding is far more about scheme than it is about ability. Detroit is a team that relies heavily on having at least one big man (and often two) play within ten feet of the hoop constantly. Thus, they are going to have someone in position to grab more ORBs. Boston tends to play an outside-in game, with it's only one big often on the perimeter. Boston also tends to forgo crashing for ORBs in favor of transition D -- a critical part of why the Celtics have the #3 defense, which happens to surrender a full 4.4 points per 100 possessions fewer than Detroit's defense. That more than makes up for the measly extra 1.8 offensive rebounds that Detroit grabs every 100 possessions.