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I can\u2019t get on board with the trophy for best defensive player of the year being named after<\/a> anyone but Dikembe Mutombo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I love Hakeem Olajuwon, the man is an incredible champion, fantastic human being, and easily one of the greatest players of all time. \u00a0And although I\u2019m a little surprised that the stats and numbers don\u2019t support my argument, I think what it really boils down to is the fact that in terms of knee-jerk perception, when people think of legendary defenders, there\u2019s no way Hakeem comes to mind before Dikembe Mutombo does.<\/span><\/p>\n I get the NBA\u2019s decision and logic, Olajuwon made more All-Defensive teams than Dikembe did (9 vs. 6), averaged more blocks, had more total blocks, and was vastly the greater steals threat.\u00a0 But the thing is, Hakeem Olajuwon was outstanding at pretty much everything in basketball, defense and offense.\u00a0 For god\u2019s sake, he\u2019s one of the only guys in history to ever have a quadruple double.\u00a0 If not for the existence of Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon would probably have more MVPs and more championships in his career, and the MVP trophy would\u2019ve been named after him.<\/span><\/p>\n When you say the name \u201cHakeem Olajuwon,\u201d probably the first thing that will come to anyone\u2019s mind is him completely humiliating David Robinson<\/a> in the 1995 playoffs.\u00a0 Sure, Olajuwon was statistically the better defender than Mutombo was, but he was still a prolific scorer that was a tremendous offensive force that the Houston Rockets relied upon to carry the team.<\/span><\/p>\n But when you say the name \u201cDikembe Mutombo,\u201d probably the first thing that comes to mind aside from the GEICO commercial<\/a>, is the countless number of blocks<\/a> he rejected throughout his illustrious career.\u00a0 There was a best-of-five playoff series in 1994 where he blocked 31 shots in five games<\/a>, which is complete insanity, and through his pure defense, his #8 seed Denver Nuggets upset the #1 Seattle Supersonics in one of the greatest upsets in the history of the game.<\/span><\/p>\n Mutombo wasn\u2019t a terrible scorer, but it was never his priority to be the man on offense.\u00a0 All the teams he\u2019s been on have always had a primary scorer aside from him, because his job was always, defense.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Dikembe Mutombo was defense.\u00a0 And no disrespect to the Dream, who may have all of the better numbers, but when people think of defense, they\u2019re probably not thinking of him first.\u00a0 They\u2019re thinking of the finger wagging, the swag, and the guy who built his entire career on being able to alter entire offenses just by being on the court.<\/span><\/p>\n I get why the NBA went with Hakeem, but I genuinely think they missed a great opportunity to really make a tsunami instead of a wave.\u00a0 If it were the Dikembe Mutombo Defensive Player of the Year, the trophy could easily, easily have been a trophy of a hand wagging a finger like Mutombo used to do.\u00a0 Doing so makes the trophy have swagger and a bit of edge, and players in the league might actually want to step it up defensively if they thought they could win some baller hardware.\u00a0 Next thing you know, we\u2019re back to the NBA of the 90s of 86-74 final scores, where any action inside the arc usually results in a block or a steal, resulting in all games becoming the glorified three-point shootouts they\u2019ve evolved into anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n But all sports fan know the saying, defense wins championships.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I can\u2019t get on board with the trophy for best defensive player of the year being named after anyone but Dikembe Mutombo.\u00a0 I love Hakeem Olajuwon, the man is an incredible champion, fantastic human being, and easily one of the greatest players of all time. \u00a0And although I\u2019m a little surprised that the stats and … Continue reading With all due respect to the Dream<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[159,59,83,58,69],"class_list":["post-49125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-advertising","tag-basketball","tag-observations","tag-sports","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49127,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49125\/revisions\/49127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}