Hakeem Olajuwon

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Full name

Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon

Born

1963-01-21, Lagos, Nigeria

Nationality

Nigerian / American

Height

7′0″ (213 cm)

Position

Center

Teams

Houston Rockets, Toronto Raptors

Hall of Fame

Inducted 2008

Hakeem Olajuwon is the most skilled center of the modern NBA era and the only player in league history to win the regular-season Most Valuable Player, the Defensive Player of the Year, and the NBA Finals MVP in the same season (1993-94). He is a two-time NBA champion, a two-time Finals MVP, a two-time Defensive Player of the Year, a twelve-time All-Star, a six-time All-NBA First Team selection, and the all-time NBA leader in career blocks (3,830). He is the only player in league history with more than 3,000 blocks and more than 2,000 steals. He was born in Lagos, Nigeria, did not pick up a basketball until he was fifteen years old, played soccer as a goalkeeper through his teenage years, and arrived at the University of Houston in 1981 as an international scholarship with zero American basketball-scouting profile. Seventeen years later he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The NBA renamed its Defensive Player of the Year trophy in his honor in 2022.

Lagos and the soccer years (1963–1980)

He was born January 21, 1963 in Lagos, Nigeria. His father Salam Olajuwon operated a small cement and building-materials business. His mother Abike Olajuwon was a street vendor. He was the third of eight children. He attended Muslim Teachers College in Lagos. He was, through his childhood and teenage years, a soccer player. His position was goalkeeper. The footwork that later defined his basketball game (the pivot, the up-and-under, the fake-and-spin that the Houston media corps eventually named the “Dream Shake”) came directly from his goalkeeping training, as Olajuwon has confirmed in every interview he has given on the subject. His 1996 autobiography Living the Dream devotes an entire chapter to the soccer-to-basketball translation of footwork.

He began playing basketball at 15, in 1978. Within two years he was the best amateur basketball player in Nigeria. In 1980, a Nigerian Olympic coach named Christopher Pond (who had coached in the United States in the 1970s) sent a video of Olajuwon to several American college programs. Guy Lewis, the head coach at the University of Houston, was the only one who responded.

The University of Houston and Phi Slama Jama (1981–1984)

Olajuwon redshirted his freshman year. As a sophomore (1982-83) he was a key member of the “Phi Slama Jama” Houston Cougars, a team that also featured Clyde Drexler and that reached the 1983 NCAA championship game. The team was nicknamed by Houston Chronicle columnist Thomas Bonk for the exuberant dunk-heavy style. North Carolina State’s Jim Valvano, coaching an Elite Eight upset, beat the Cougars 54-52 on a Lorenzo Charles dunk at the buzzer. Olajuwon had 20 points and 18 rebounds in the game.

As a junior (1983-84) Olajuwon averaged 16.8 points, 13.5 rebounds, and 5.6 blocks. He was the consensus national player of the year and a first-team All-American. Houston reached the NCAA championship game again and lost to Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown Hoyas 84-75. It is the only NCAA men’s basketball tournament in which the eventual #1 overall pick was defeated in the championship game by the eventual #2 overall pick of the next year’s draft. Olajuwon declared for the 1984 NBA Draft after his junior year.

The 1984 Draft and the early Rockets years (1984–1993)

The Houston Rockets held the first overall pick of the 1984 NBA Draft. The Portland Trail Blazers, at two, took Sam Bowie. The Chicago Bulls, at three, took Michael Jordan. The Rockets, managed by Ray Patterson, took Olajuwon. The selection is, in retrospect, correct; no reasonable draft-night evaluation in 1984 would have taken the Dean Smith-system wing Jordan ahead of the generational defensive center Olajuwon. The subsequent career arcs of both players, and the popular-culture memory that frames the 1984 draft as “Portland missed on Jordan,” has largely papered over the fact that Houston made the correct decision at one.

The Rockets paired him with the 7’4” Ralph Sampson to form the “Twin Towers.” He averaged 20.6 points and 11.9 rebounds as a rookie. He was the 1984-85 NBA Rookie of the Year runner-up (behind Jordan). The 1985-86 Rockets reached the NBA Finals, where the Boston Celtics (with Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson, and Danny Ainge) beat them in six. Olajuwon averaged 24.3 in the series. He was 23.

Ralph Sampson was traded in December 1987, and Olajuwon became the solo centerpiece of the Rockets for the rest of the decade. He led the league in rebounding twice (1988-89, 1989-90) and in blocks three times (1989-90, 1990-91, 1992-93). He was a nine-time All-Star through 1993. The Rockets were a middle-of-the-playoff-bracket team through the 1980s and early 1990s, never reaching past the conference finals.

1994: the triple crown

The 1993-94 season is the most-cited individual-season résumé in NBA history. Olajuwon averaged 27.3 points, 11.9 rebounds, 3.7 blocks, and 1.6 steals on .528 shooting. He won the regular-season MVP with 69 of 98 first-place votes. He won the Defensive Player of the Year award. He led the Rockets to the NBA Finals against Patrick Ewing’s New York Knicks, a ten-year rematch of their 1984 Houston-Georgetown national championship.

The 1994 Finals went seven games. Olajuwon averaged 26.9 points on 50% shooting. Patrick Ewing averaged 18.9 points on 36%. In Game 6 at the Summit in Houston, with the Rockets leading 86-84 and 2.2 seconds remaining, Olajuwon blocked John Starks’s three-point attempt at the buzzer. The Rockets won Game 7 90-84. He was the Finals MVP. He became, that June, the only player in NBA history to win MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, and Finals MVP in the same season. No player has repeated it since.

1995: the repeat

The 1994-95 season was the lockout-shortened 66-game year during which Michael Jordan was still playing baseball in the Chicago White Sox farm system. (Jordan would return to the NBA on March 18, 1995.) The Rockets acquired Clyde Drexler in a February 1995 trade with Portland and entered the playoffs as the sixth seed in the West with a 47-35 record. They beat Utah in the first round, Phoenix in the second round (down 3-1), San Antonio (the #1 seed, with MVP David Robinson) in the conference finals, and swept the Orlando Magic (with Shaquille O’Neal) in the Finals. Olajuwon averaged 35.3 points against Robinson in the WCF. Robinson, after the series, publicly said, “You don’t solve Hakeem. You try to manage him.”

Olajuwon averaged 33.0 points and 10.3 rebounds across the 1995 playoffs. He was Finals MVP for the second consecutive season. The 1995 championship, coming against the best versions of Robinson’s Spurs and Shaq’s Magic, remains one of the most-respected playoff runs of the 1990s NBA. It is the only time in league history that a sixth seed has won a championship.

The late Rockets years and retirement (1995–2002)

He won six more All-Star selections through 1997. He averaged 23.1 points as a thirty-five-year-old in 1998-99. He missed 50 games in 1999-2000 with a herniated disk. The 2000-01 Rockets finished 45-37 and missed the playoffs. In August 2001 he was traded to the Toronto Raptors for a 2002 first-round pick. He played one season in Toronto, averaged 7.1 points and 6.0 rebounds in 61 games, and retired in the fall of 2002 due to chronic back problems. He was 39.

His Houston #34 was retired on November 9, 2002 in a ceremony at the Toyota Center.

Hall of Fame, the Trophy renaming, and the Big Man Camp

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on September 12, 2008, alongside Patrick Ewing (the rival from the 1984 NCAA final and the 1994 NBA Finals, which is the only two-time-in-a-career matchup of that kind in basketball history). His presenter was Clyde Drexler. On June 1, 2022, the NBA announced that the Defensive Player of the Year Award trophy would be renamed the Hakeem Olajuwon Trophy, effective with the 2022-23 season. He is the fourth NBA player to have a major league trophy named after him (the others are Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan).

In 2006, at the Big Man Camp he runs at his property in Houston, Olajuwon began offering one-on-one and small-group training sessions on post-up footwork to current NBA players. His students have included, at various points: Kobe Bryant (in the summer of 2010), Dwight Howard (2008, 2009), Yao Ming (before and during 2008-09), LeBron James (summer of 2011), Kevin Durant (summer of 2012), Amar’e Stoudemire, Blake Griffin, Joel Embiid, and Paul Gasol. The training work is, by the public statements of most of the players who have participated, the primary reason the 2010s NBA saw a renaissance of post-up skill among perimeter players after the league’s shift toward three-point-heavy offense.

Legacy

The basketball argument about Olajuwon places him, in most retrospective rankings, in the top ten players of all time. The Athletic’s 2022 NBA 75 ranking placed him eighth. Bill Simmons’s Book of Basketball ranks him seventh. The 1993-94 triple-crown season remains the single most-cited individual-season résumé ever constructed. His career blocks record is unlikely to be broken for another generation.

The cultural legacy has two lasting categories. First, he is the reason a generation of Nigerian-American children have played basketball; the Olajuwon path from Lagos to Houston to Finals MVP is the documented recruitment pitch for every current African basketball federation. Second, the Big Man Camp has produced measurable technical improvement in the post-up game of nine future Hall of Famers. He is, in a way that Shaq and Duncan are not, a basketball teacher in retirement. That is a choice.

He is in real estate full-time in Houston. His properties, many of them acquired in the late 1990s during downturns, now produce annual income estimated by Forbes at approximately $12 million. He is a practicing Muslim. He has fasted during Ramadan during multiple NBA playoff runs, which is a detail he has said in interviews he is more proud of than any basketball achievement.

Gear

Shop official Hakeem Olajuwon jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or pick up Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon.

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Sources

Basketball-Reference is the primary career statistical source. The Lagos soccer background and the recruitment-to-Houston timeline are drawn from Olajuwon’s 1996 autobiography Living the Dream (Little Brown) and from the Houston Cougars’ 1981-84 athletics archives. The 1994 Finals and the Starks-block sequence are from NBA.com’s Finals game-log archive. The Dream Shake technical analysis and the DPOY trophy renaming are from Jack McCallum’s June 1995 Sports Illustrated feature and the NBA’s June 2022 official announcement. The Big Man Camp client roster is from Chris Broussard’s September 2011 ESPN feature. The real-estate income estimate is from Forbes’s 2023 Sports Money issue.