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WNBA Defensive Player of the Year

award

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ505872 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Women's National Basketball Association's Defensive Player of the Year Award is an annual Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) award given since the league's inaugural season in 1997, to the top defensive player of the regular season. The winner is selected by a panel of sportswriters and broadcasters throughout the United States, each of whom casts a vote for first, second, and third place selections. Each first-place vote is worth five points; each second-place vote is worth three points; and each third-place vote is worth one point. The player with the highest point total, regardless of the number of first-place votes, wins the award.

Tamika Catchings has won the defensive player of the year award more times than any other player, with a record of five.

Winners

Multi-time winners

See also

List of sports awards honoring women

References

"WNBA Defensive Player of the Year". Archived from the original on May 25, 2011. Retrieved January 19, 2009.

Editorial summary

“WNBA Defensive Player of the Year” enters the record as award. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WNBA, Defensive and Player can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1997, 2011, 2009—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1997. Its strongest next move is a source search built around WNBA, Defensive and Player.
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Why this record matters

“WNBA Defensive Player of the Year” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, WNBA, Defensive and Player provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q505872. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2011 and 2009.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “WNBA Defensive Player of the Year” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.