One of the knocks on Curry has always been his rebounding. Over his first 4 seasons with the Bulls, Curry displayed an alarming trend of actually rebounding worse with each successive year. Here are his rebound rate* numbers with the Bulls:

01/02 13.8
02/03 12.4
03/04 11.4
04/05 10.5

* rebound rate measures the percentage of available rebounds a player grabs during his time on the court. So for instance, in the 01/02 season, Curry rebounded 13.8% of all missed shots while on the court.

The declining trend in Curry's rebound rate is even worse when one considers that the actual numbers themselves are not terribly good. 13.8 is decent (a 13.8 in 04/05 would place 59th, sandwiched between Kenny Thomas and Pau Gasol), but 10.5 is quite poor for a sizeable starting center (the 100th best rebound rate in 04/05 belonged to Josh Howard, clocking in at 11.1; thus far this season, players with a 10.5 reb-r are Jason Richardson, Rashard Lewis, and Carlos Delfino).

So far, in this limited amount of games, Curry has bucked the trend a bit with a 15.9 reb-r. That's good for 35th thus far this season, tied with Kevin Garnett (surprisingly low number for Garnett actually) and ahead of guys like Bogut (15.7), Jermaine O'Neal (15.5), Bosh and Okafor (14.9), and Odom (14.8). In 04/05, a 15.9 reb-r would have ranked 33rd in the league, between Zach Randolph and Zaza Pachulia. Curry's 15.9 reb-r is also second best among Knick players who have seen meaningful PT, ranking only behind Frye's 17.8 (which ties for 15th best in the league thus far).

Very interesting, and Frye was supposed to be a bad rebounder, too. Thanks for stats man.

Posted by OAK:

Cool. Where did you get the stats from?

Knickerblogger.net state page
http://www.knickerblogger.net/stats/2006/index.htm

The best explanation of rebound rate I can find is this:

Rebound Rate - While rebounds per 48 minutes is a very good way to evaluate rebounders, you can do even better by taking into account that some players have the opportunity to grab more rebounds than others. The most fair way to evaluate rebounders is by percentage of all missed shots when they are in the game that they rebound. (This is usually estimated by their team's and opponent's rebounds per minute). This is known as Rebound Rate or Rebound Percentage (Reb%).

Reb% = Reb / (((TmReb + OppReb)/TmMin)*Min)

http://www.nba.com/sonics/news/stats101.html

So it accounts for things like pace and minutes played, which can be confounding factors in traditional rebound per game stats.

It does not account for quality of rebounding of teammates, though, which is a good point to raise. I actually had the same thought after posting-- maybe Curry's low and declining reb-r numbers had a lot to do with Chandler's high and increasing reb-r numbers (14.4, 15.6, 18.9, 19.8). Without giving it too much thought, though, it seems like it'd be rather difficult to do meaningful adjustments based on quality of teammates.

Yeah, it's amazing that Curry and Frye were considered soft and softer respectively before the season. I guess Isiah saw something most people didn't see.