kpascual can I interest you with this study?

[Kathoro]

It has been shown that the offensive rebound percentages associated with misses are highest for shots close to the basket and from 3PT range. I was wondering if these percentages show a different pattern for high usage guards, hence the "Kobe Bryant Assist." The theory is that someone like Kobe will draw more defenders from the basket, and misses from mid range then have a greater chance of being rebounded by the offense and immediately put back into the basket.

For this study, a pool of guards satisfying a minimum high usage rate of X could be investigated. The offensive rebound percentages as a function of shot distance could be investigated for several different cutoff usage rates. If the "Kobe Bryant Assist" hypothesis holds, the misses of high usage guards from mid-range will be associated with greater offensive rebound percentages than average. Also, the higher the cutoff usage is set, the greater the offensive rebound percentages from mid-range are.

[kpascual]

Unfortunately, I don't have all that much time nowadays to do relatively involved analyses, but if you'd like to help me out and identify the high usage vs. low usage guards to analyze, that would be great.

Also, you can PM with these kinds of requests, or even leave me a note on my sparsely populated Twitter account @vorped.