Coleman Rebounds . . . and Rebounds . . . and Rebounds

You can squabble over the best shooter in college basketball and you can dicker about the top defender.

But Syracuse’s Derrick Coleman is on the verge of ending the argument over the best rebounder -- at least in the modern era.

As of last week, the 6-foot-10 senior had 1,431 rebounds and was third on the list of college’s all-time top rebounders since 1973, trailing University of Nevada-Reno’s Pete Padgett by 33 and Virginia’s Ralph Sampson by 80.

“Who’s the best shooter? Who’s the best passer? Nobody knows,” said Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim.

“But if somebody says, ‘Who’s the best rebounder?’ People will say Derrick Coleman. He’s the guy for four years, day in and day out, who’s been the best rebounder,” said Boeheim.

Naturally, one would expect a coach to extol his own player. But similar accolades flow from opposing players, coaches and college basketball observers.

“Derrick’s the best rebounder in the country,” St. John’s center Jayson Williams said after Coleman grabbed 17 rebounds against the Redmen in a game at the Carrier Dome earlier this season. “He’s a man among boys when it comes to the boards.”

“The kid wants every ball that comes off the rim,” said Missouri Coach Norm Stewart, whose squad faced Syracuse twice last season. “I don’t think there’s a better rebounder in the country that gets the fast break going off a rebound than Coleman.”

Marty Blake, head of scouting for the National Basketball Association, agreed that Coleman is college basketball’s chairman of the boards.

“It’s not a question of how many rebounds he gets. He’s got the ability to be an outstanding rebounder at the next level. He’s the No. 1 power forward in the country,” said Blake.

Coleman, expected by most to be the NBA’s top draft pick in June, is a complete player, who can swish three-pointers as easily as he can swat away opponents’ shots. By the time he finishes his four-year career at Syracuse, he will be the Orangemen’s all-time scoring leader and ranked in the top 10 in virtually every statistical category.

But it is rebounding that has become synonymous with Coleman’s name.

He broke Rony Seikaly’s school rebounding record of 1,094 two-thirds of the way through his junior season and eclipsed former Georgetown star Patrick Ewing’s Big East career record of 597 rebounds in 62 games in just 55 games.

Along the way, he has established new school season records for freshmen, sophomores and juniors, setting an all-time Syracuse single-season mark with 422 caroms last year. He has recorded double-figure rebounds in 83 of his 145 games at Syracuse, with a career-high of 21. Six times he has pulled down 19 rebounds in a game, including in the 1987 NCAA championship game against Indiana.

Coleman has ranked among the nation’s top 10 rebounders in each of the past three seasons and has led the Big East in rebounding twice, losing the conference rebounding title as a sophomore to Pittsburgh’s Jerome Lane in the last game of the season.

“As far as rebounding, you have to have the heart and desire to go after it,” said Coleman.

The Detroit native is fifth nationally, averaging 12.2 rebounds per game. He has a minimum of five games left in his career--three regular season, one Big East tournament, one NCAA tournament--to surpass Sampson’s modern-day mark.

That means he needs to average about 16 rebounds a game. However, if Syracuse wins just one game in each tournament, Coleman would need to average just 11.4 rebounds per game to set a new standard.

Coleman--nor likely anyone else--will ever approach college basketball’s all-time rebounding record of 2,201 held by LaSalle’s Tom Gola.

That’s why a category was created for modern players, said Gary Johnson, the NCAA’s assistant statistics coordinator for Division I basketball.

“We did it to get today’s players recognized. The totals set in the 1950s and 1960s are unapproachable for them,” said Johnson, who added that the NCAA first considered rebounding as a statistic in 1951.

In fact, Sampson wouldn’t even appear on the pre-1973 top 10, he said. Steve Hamilton, who graduated from Morehead State in 1958, is No. 10 on that list with 1,675 rebounds.

There are several reasons why the pre-1973 totals are so high, explained Johnson.

The teams of Gola’s era took a combined average of nearly 140 shots per game and never shot above an average of 40% in any year during the 1950s. Last year, teams averaged a combined 118 shots per contest with a 48% accuracy rate.

“They took more shots and made fewer so there were more rebounds available,” said Johnson.

The NCAA picked 1973 as the dividing line because that was the year freshmen became eligible again to play at the varsity level, he said.

“I was 6-6 and in my day nobody had big guys like they do today,” said Gola, who works for a Valley Forge, Pa., investment company. “We ran a five-man weave. I was the biggest guy on the team and my job was to go to the boards.

“Today, you have guards that are 6-9 and most teams have a couple of 7-footers, or guys that are 6-10, 6-11. There’s a real crowd around now when there’s a missed shot,” said Gola, who graduated in 1955.

Because there are so many big, strong players fighting for the same rebound, Boeheim said Coleman’s numbers are even more impressive. Add to that, the fact that Coleman is a multi-dimensional player and, Boeheim said, it’s easy to understand why his NBA stock is so high.

“You normally think of rebounders as guys who don’t do much else,” said Boeheim. “And there’s a lot of guys in the NBA who can shot and pass the ball. So a player who is very talented and can rebound, who can score and pass, handle the ball and play good defense, is quite special.”