As expected, Magic center Dwight Howard took home the NBA's Defensive Player of the Year award for the second consecutive season, according to the AP. Howard will accept the award at a press conference at 2 PM EST on Tuesday.
Magic’s Dwight Howard Wins Defensive Player Of The Year Award Again
For the second straight year, Howard led the league in both rebounding and blocked shots, averaging 13.2 rebounds and 2.8 blocks per game respectively. Howard is the only player to achieve this feat in back-to-back seasons (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Hakeem Olajuwon and Ben Wallace are the only others to have managed it as well, although Bill Russell would certainly be on this list as well if the NBA had tracked blocks when he played).
While Howard's rebounding and blocked shot numbers certainly jump off the page, his contributions on the defensive end are perhaps even more impressive when you consider how dominant the Magic have been on that end of the floor despite not boasting any other elite lockdown players. The Magic finished in a tie (with the Bobcats) for the top defensive efficiency in the league this season at 100.2 -- where defensive efficiency measures how many points a team allows to its opponents per 100 possession -- and this was due almost entirely to Howard. The rest of the Magic's regulars are, at best, average defenders, but Howard's ability to completely shut down the paint nullified that fact, and catapulted Orlando to the top of the league's defensive rankings.
Howard’s dMult rating captures his defensive superiority perhaps better than any other measure. dMult is an advanced stat that measures how opponents do against a player compared to their season averages, on a per possession basis. Howard’s league-leading dMult rating .548 means that opposing centers have only produced slightly more than half of their usual numbers when they went up against him; that is a just otherwordly number considering that most other top defenders put up a dMult of around .700 or so.
Howard was the youngest player to win Defensive Player of the Year accolades last season when he was 23 years old, and if he continues to post similar numbers in the years to come, it’s difficult to imagine anyone unseating him anytime soon.
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