Is Angel Reese really the queen of mebounds? Do the Valkyries mebound?

The self-rebounding sensation that's sweeping the association.

I have a friend—you probably have one of these friends too—who is proudly (inexplicably) not a WNBA fan. He’s not really a basketball fan, either, which makes some of his WNBA comments especially grating, and one thing he occasionally likes to do is show me Angel Reese “lowlight” compilations. These are often accompanied by ill-informed complaints about her “mebounds,” rebounds grabbed off one’s own miss.

Thankfully, Reese herself has taken a generally good approach to such criticisms—of which, sadly, there are many. This is a good piece in The Athletic that covers the topic more broadly, including Reese filing a trademark for “mebounds” and the origin of the term. To quote the piece’s author, Ngwa Numfor:

The phrase “mebounds” originated during an episode of the Club 520 podcast, a show featuring former NBA All-Star Jeff Teague and his co-hosts, DJ Wells and Brandon “Bishop B Hen” Hendricks. Hendricks jokingly referred to Reese’s rebounds as “mebounds” due to her ability to secure her own missed shots at the rim. The co-host later insisted on X that he was not “hating,” however, online trolls ran with the phrase, inevitably leading to Reese capitalizing on the momentum.

So this counterpoint is really mostly for that friend.

Does Angel Reese “mebound” dramatically?

A quick note on the process is in order here: I scraped and cleaned the WNBA’s play-by-play data to try and get mebound stats, and cross-checked it with manual tracking of film and the league’s official rebounding stats. The latter held up extremely well, and the film was only marred, it seemed, by inconsistencies in the league’s clip-to-action processing. That being said, I can’t entirely rule out corruption issues caused by scorer’s effects (how live scorers attribute actions) and potential unfound data errors, so take this with a grain of salt, or just watch the indisputable clips, or discount it entirely as my friend will likely do.

Reese leads the WNBA in total rebounds, with 150 in 13 games (11.5 RPG), and in total offensive rebounds, with 52 or 4 per game. Depending on how you filter out small sample size players, she’s either second or third in the far more instructive offensive rebound rate (she grabs 12.7% of available misses) and third in DREB rate at 25.3%. Chicago, with Kamilla Cardoso also on the roster, is second in the WNBA in team OREB rate at 37.1%, and their 11.2 second-chance points per game are tied for third in the league.

(For full disclosure, I watched the playlist of all 52 of Reese’s OREBs and came up with essentially the same number.) Among the top 10 total offensive rebounders in the league, Reese leads the pack with 19 mebounds. But her mebounds don’t account for a drastically higher share of her offensive rebounds than others on the list, like Indiana’s Aliyah Boston or Chicago teammate Cardoso.

What some people think about when they critique Reese are plays like this:

However, Reese has dramatically cut back on those sort of plays in recent games. Her mebound rate is down in the Sky’s last several contest. She’s also added six positive plays on her mebounds, with four buckets and two fouls drawn immediately after the rebound:

What the numbers also tend to elide is how certain rebounds are scored. These, for example, counted, although it’s hard to assert that they’re true rebounds; strips and bumps are a little different, in my mind.

Reese does lead the league in total mebounds, as is to be expected when she takes shots in the restricted area in the 99th percentile, per HerHoopStats, and makes them in only the 4th percentile. Plenty of people have talked about her finishing, although cleaning up the head-down putback plays will change those numbers with or without tweaks to her finishing.

Jackie Young’s inclusion on the list probably comes as a surprise. It should not.

Guards with length and, more importantly, desire, get their own boards fairly well, as we’ll see.

Do the Valkyries mebound?

You’ve probably already noticed Kayla Thornton on some of the top rebounding lists. Her tenacity has been a big part of Golden State’s early successes. The Valkyries rank third in the WNBA in OREB rate (33.1%) and first in DREB rate (72.4%). They don’t mebound a ton, ranking 10th among teams in mebound share, but they do rank fifth in the league in immediately converting those mebounds into a made shot or foul.

(I would put money on Laeticia Amihere getting on the mebound board sooner rather than later.)

Thornton leads the Valkyries in offensive and defensive rebounding, and unsurprisingly leads them in mebounding too:

Valkyries viewers will also not be surprised to see contributions from Temi Fágbénlé and Monique Billings:

Veronica Burton’s place on the list is reminiscent of Jackie Young on the league leaderboard. The link between the two includes, but is not limited to, shot selection: Young, per HerHoopStats, ranks in the 99th percentile of shots taken from the non-restricted area of the paint, and Burton ranks in the 92nd percentile. Without charting it (perhaps another time!), just looking at the film, those non-restricted paint areas are prime mebounding ground especially off guards getting downhill.

Burton has done an excellent job passing after her mebounds, with Golden State netting three three-pointers on her kickouts.

As Reese continues to develop her game, it should be more of the same, especially with the paint proximity of Cardoso:

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go send this article to a friend.