Spurs' Victor Wembanyama shatters multiple NBA history records with DPOY award win originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
It is official. Victor Wembanyama has won the 2025-26 NBA Defensive Player of the Year award. The San Antonio Spurs superstar was more than expected to win the award but he shatters a lot of records along with it too. What exactly are these records? Well, it includes usurping DPOY-winning greats like Dwight Howard, Alvin Robertson, and Kawhi Leonard among others.
To start off, Victor Wembanyama is now the youngest winner of the DPOY award. Dwight Howard previously held the record back in 2009 when he played for the Orlando Magic at 23 years old. As of the moment, Wembanyama is 22 years and 107 days old. This means that he also usurps guys like Kawhi Leonard, Jaren Jackson Jr., and Evan Mobley.
Unsurprisingly, this also means that Wembanyama is the youngest Spurs player to have won the DPOY honors. He beats out both Leonard and Alvin Robertson who won it back when they were 23 years old.
More than all of that, he is also the first player in NBA history to win the DPOY unanimously. He earned 100 first place votes which sets him above guys like Hakeem Olajuwon, David Robinson, and Dikembe Mutombo among other legends, per NBA.com.
Through this, Wembanyama also joins an insane list of people who have won their awards race unanimously. Notably, Stephen Curry was the only unanimous NBA MVP. Only Ralph Sampson, David Robinson, Blake Griffin, Damian Lillard, and Karl-Anthony Towns were able to win their trophy races unanimously too, it was for Rookie of the Year.
To top all of these things off, Wembanyama now holds two awards which he won unanimously. The first was his ROTY win back in 2024 which was not at all in question. Now, he has the DPOY too. The Spurs star becomes the first player in NBA history to unanimously take home multiple pieces of hardware without dropping a single first place vote.
If he continues this trajectory and carries those votes along with him in the bigger race, Wembanyama could be the youngest NBA MVP ever over Derrick Rose too.