Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert has been named the 2020-21 Kia NBA Defensive Player of the Year, the NBA announced today.<\/p>\n
This marks the third NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award for Gobert, who also earned the honor in the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons.\u00a0 The 7-1 French native is the fourth player to win the award at least three times, joining Dikembe Mutombo (four), Ben Wallace (four) and Dwight Howard (three).<\/p>\n
Gobert received 84 first-place votes and earned 464 points from a global panel of 100 sportswriters and broadcasters.\u00a0 Philadelphia 76ers guard Ben Simmons finished in second place with 287 points (15 first-place votes).\u00a0 Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green, the 2016-17 Kia NBA Defensive Player of the Year, finished in third place with 76 points.\u00a0 Players were awarded five points for each first-place vote, three points for each second-place vote and one point for each third-place vote.<\/p>\n
In his eighth NBA season, Gobert led the league in defensive rebounds per game (10.1), total defensive rebounds (720) and total blocked shots (190) and ranked second in blocked shots per game (2.70).\u00a0 He recorded six games with least 15 defensive rebounds and eight games with five or more blocks.\u00a0 Gobert grabbed a season-high 20 defensive rebounds against the Warriors on March 14 and blocked a career-high nine shots against the Chicago Bulls on March 22.<\/p>\n
According to NBA Advanced Stats, Gobert ranked second in the NBA in\u00a0defensive win shares<\/a>, which measures a player\u2019s defensive impact on winning.\u00a0 He defended the most\u00a0field goal attempts at the rim<\/a>\u00a0in the NBA (549) and held opponents to 50.1 percent shooting on those shots, the\u00a0third-lowest mark<\/a>\u00a0among the 27 players who defended at least 300 shots at the rim this season.<\/p>\n Behind Gobert, Utah finished third in the NBA in defensive rating (107.5) and second in opponents\u2019 field goal percentage (44.7).\u00a0 The strong defense helped propel the Jazz to a league-leading 52-20 record and the top seed in the Western Conference for the 2021 NBA Playoffs.<\/p>\n Selected as an NBA All-Star for the second time, Gobert averaged 14.3 points and 13.5 rebounds in 71 games this season.\u00a0 Gobert led the NBA in total rebounds (960) and ranked second in rebounds per game.\u00a0 He also shot an NBA-high 67.5 percent from the field, leading the league in that category for the second time in the last three seasons.<\/p>\n Gobert, the 27th<\/sup>\u00a0overall pick in the 2013 NBA Draft, has career averages of 12.0 points, 11.3 rebounds and 2.24 blocks in 545 games, all with the Jazz.\u00a0 He was voted to the NBA All-Defensive First Team in each of the previous four seasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" French center obtains his third career award joining an elite list<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":158,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_spbk_hide_featured":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[399],"tags":[5576],"rumors":[],"typology":[],"posizionamento":[],"class_list":["post-219308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nba","tag-rudy-gobert-en"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/158"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219308"},{"taxonomy":"rumors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rumors?post=219308"},{"taxonomy":"typology","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/typology?post=219308"},{"taxonomy":"posizionamento","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posizionamento?post=219308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}