(SportsRadio 610) - The NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award has been renamed to The Hakeem Olajuwon Trophy, in honor of the Houston Rockets legend and Hall of Famer, the league announced Tuesday.
“I am honored to have the opportunity to celebrate the league’s best defensive player each year,” said Olajuwon. “Great basketball teams are defined nby their ability to defend, with every great team connected by an elite defensive anchor.”
Olajuwon was a back-to-back winner of the Defensive Player of the Year award in 1992-93 and 1993-94 and was named All-Defensive First Team five times and Second Team four times.
He is the NBA’s all-time leader in blocks (3,830) while ranking ninth in steals (2,162) and 14th in rebounding (13,748).
Steals and blocks didn’t become an official NBA statistic until the 1973-74 season. Olajuwon is the only player in NBA history who is ranked top-10 in both categories.
Olajuwon has 774 more steals than any other center in league history and has 541 more blocks than the second ranked player, former Rocket Dikembe Mutombo.
Interestingly enough, Olajuwon, who retired in 2002, would still be the all-time leader in blocks even if he’d have retired five years earlier than he did.
Only five players have recorded more than 3,000 career blocks and no current player has reached 1,800.
Over his first 12 seasons, Olajuwon averaged 12.2 rebounds, 3.5 blocks, and 1.9 steals. He averaged at least 10.0 rebounds and 2.00 blocks in each of those 12 seasons. Only Shaquille O’Neal has matched those numbers in a 12-year stretch in NBA history.
Olajuwon is also the NBA’s all-time playoff leader in blocks per game (3.26) and is the only player in postseason history with at least 300 blocks and 200 steals.
The University of Houston product was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA history in 1996, had his number 34 retired by the Rockets in 2002.
He was enshrined into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and named to the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.
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Shaun Bijani has spent the last 16 years covering the Houston sports scene for SportsRadio 610. Follow him on Twitter @ShaunBijani.
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