How tall is Hakeem Olajuwon?

Hakeem Olajuwon's height: the official 7′0″

The NBA lists Hakeem Olajuwon at 213 cm (7′0″) and 255 lb (116 kg). Those are the numbers on his league profile, the figures Houston used in his prime, and the height Wikidata records for him. NBA.com's own retrospective on his career repeatedly calls him the "7-foot" half of Houston's Twin Towers, and that is how his era remembered him.

A small number of reference sites disagree. Stats Crew, a statistics database, lists him at 6′10″ and 250 lb, and the same lower figure circulates on trivia pages. None of those sources cites a measurement, and no reputable outlet has reported one. It is worth knowing why such discrepancies exist at all. Before 2019, NBA teams set their own listings, and many were taken in sneakers or simply rounded to a flattering number. In September 2019, the league began requiring teams to certify each player's height with shoes off. Olajuwon had retired 17 years earlier, so his listing was never re-checked under the new rule. The honest summary is that 213 cm is the official figure, a barefoot measurement has never been published, and claims of 6′10″ remain unverified.

From goalkeeper in Lagos to basketball at 15

Olajuwon was born on January 21, 1963, in Lagos, Nigeria. Unlike almost every other great center, he did not grow up with basketball. As a teenager he was a soccer goalkeeper and a handball player, and according to NBA.com he only joined a basketball team at about 15, after a classmate persuaded the coach to let him try out. He was playing at Muslim Teachers College in Lagos at the time.

That late start shaped everything about how he used his size. A goalkeeper learns to change direction instantly, read an attacker's hips and react with hands and feet together. Handball adds pivoting and passing in tight spaces. NBA.com credits those years with the footwork and agility that balanced his strength and size, and it is hard to find a better explanation for a 213 cm player who moved like a guard.

He came to the United States to play for coach Guy Lewis at the University of Houston, where the high-flying teams of the early 1980s were nicknamed Phi Slama Jama. Houston reached the Final Four in three straight seasons with him in the middle. His college teammates included Clyde Drexler, who would rejoin him in Houston more than a decade later.

Houston lost two consecutive national championship games with him in the middle. The 1983 final ended with North Carolina State's famous last-second dunk, and the 1984 final pitted Olajuwon against Georgetown and Patrick Ewing, the other great center of his generation. Ewing's team won that day. A decade later, the two met again with far more at stake in the NBA Finals, and the result went the other way. Their rivalry is one of the few in basketball history that ran from college to the professional championship round with two players of the same listed height at its center.

His college years also showed how raw he still was. He had played organized basketball for only a few years when he arrived in Houston, and he spent his first season adjusting to the pace, physicality and conditioning of American college basketball. By his final college season he led the country in rebounding and blocked shots, which shows how fast the goalkeeper's instincts carried over to the new sport.

The 1984 draft and the Twin Towers

The Houston Rockets made Olajuwon the first overall pick in the 1984 NBA draft, a class that also included Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and John Stockton. Selecting a center first was the conventional choice in an era built around big men, and Houston already had one. Ralph Sampson, the previous year's top pick, was listed at 7′4″.

The pairing produced one of the tallest frontcourts the league had seen. Sampson was nominally the forward, and Olajuwon the center, with roughly 10 cm separating them. As a rookie, Olajuwon finished second in the league in blocks at 2.68 per game, and in 1986 the Twin Towers took Houston to the NBA Finals, where they lost to Larry Bird's Celtics.

Heights are from this site's data, which follows official listings.

Winning through the tallest centers of the 1990s

The most striking thing about Olajuwon's championship years is who he beat. The mid-1990s were a golden age of centers, and in two seasons he went through almost all of them.

In 1993–94, he became the first player to win the regular-season MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and Finals MVP in the same season. The Finals opponent was the New York Knicks and Patrick Ewing, a center with the identical 213 cm listing and a reputation as one of the league's most physical defenders. Olajuwon averaged nearly four blocks per game in that series, and Houston won in seven.

In 1995, the Rockets were a sixth seed. In the Western Conference finals they faced San Antonio and David Robinson, who had just been named MVP and is listed at 216 cm. Olajuwon's performance in that series is still cited as one of the best individual matchups ever played at the position. In the Finals, Houston swept Orlando and its young center Shaquille O'Neal, who was taller and heavier. Olajuwon was again Finals MVP, making it two years in a row.

None of those opponents was shorter than him, and two were taller. His advantage was not size, but how quickly he could use it.

The Dream Shake

His signature move, the Dream Shake, layered pump fakes, head fakes and pivots until the defender committed, then finished with a turnaround, an up-and-under or a fadeaway. Against slower centers, the speed of the footwork mattered more than the height. Against quicker defenders, his height let him finish over them once they bit on a fake. NBA.com notes that in later offseasons he taught post footwork to younger stars, including Kobe Bryant and Dwight Howard, which says a lot about how transferable the technique is. Bryant, at 198 cm, was 15 cm shorter than his teacher.

The all-time leader in blocked shots

Olajuwon finished his career with 3,830 blocks, still the most in NBA history. He led the league in blocks in 1989–90 at 4.59 per game and in 1990–91 at 3.95 per game, and he averaged 4.17 in 1992–93. He also recorded one of the very few quadruple-doubles in league history, a 1989–90 game in which he had 11 blocks to go with double figures in points, rebounds and assists.

What separated him from other shot-blockers was that he also ranked among the steals leaders, which is rare for a center. NBA.com notes that in 1989 he became the first player to finish in the top 10 in scoring, rebounding, steals and blocks in consecutive seasons. A goalkeeper's anticipation, again, seems the most plausible explanation for a 213 cm player with a guard's hands.

Citizenship, the Olympics and final season

Olajuwon became a naturalized US citizen on April 2, 1993, which made him eligible for the American team. He won Olympic gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games as part of a roster that also included Shaquille O'Neal and David Robinson, so the three centers who had battled in the 1995 playoffs ended up sharing a frontcourt.

He spent 17 seasons in Houston before a trade sent him to the Toronto Raptors in August 2001. His one season there produced career lows of 7.1 points and 6.0 rebounds, and he retired in 2002 because of a back injury. Houston retired his number 34, and he entered the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.

The franchise's next great center was Yao Ming, who arrived as the first pick in 2002, the year Olajuwon retired. Yao was 16 cm taller, a reminder that the Rockets have had some of the tallest marquee centers in the league's history.

Compared with the average man in Nigeria and the United States

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates put the average adult Nigerian man born in the late 1950s and early 1960s at about 168 cm (5′6″), one of the higher figures in the long Nigerian series. At 213 cm, Olajuwon stood around 45 cm (nearly 18 inches) above that average. Against American men of the same generation, who averaged about 177 cm, the gap is roughly 36 cm.

The Nigerian figures are notable in their own right. The NCD-RisC data show average height in Nigeria rising through the middle of the 20th century and then slipping for those born in later decades, a pattern researchers associate with economic hardship and nutrition. The average height in Nigeria page has the full cohort series, and the United States page offers the American comparison.

Why the 1984 draft is still a height story

The 1984 draft is remembered mainly for who went third. Houston took Olajuwon first, Portland took Kentucky center Sam Bowie, listed at 7′1″, second, and Chicago selected Michael Jordan third. The order made sense by the logic of the time: teams believed championships were won by dominant centers, and both of the first two picks were seven-footers.

Hindsight usually treats the draft as a lesson about overrating height, since Jordan went on to win six titles. Olajuwon's career complicates that lesson. The first pick was a center, and he became one of the best players of the next decade, winning two championships of his own in the two seasons after Jordan's first retirement. In other words, the problem with drafting for size was not size itself. It was that Bowie, who struggled with leg injuries, could not stay on the court, while Olajuwon combined height with mobility and durability over 18 seasons.

Weight and build: lean for a center

The NBA lists Olajuwon at 116 kg (255 lb), and photographs from his early career show a much leaner frame than that. For a 213 cm player, 116 kg is light by the standards of the 1990s, when centers such as Shaquille O'Neal played at well over 135 kg. His body mass index at the listed figures works out to about 25.6, close to the boundary between the normal and overweight ranges used for the general population, which shows how poorly that measure describes elite athletes.

The leaner build was part of his style. Instead of trying to move heavier opponents with strength alone, he relied on quickness, balance and timing. That approach is also one reason why his game aged well: the moves he taught later in his life depended on footwork that any player, of any height, could study.

How Olajuwon's size fits in today's game

Modern centers are expected to defend in space, switch onto guards and finish around the rim, a description that fits Olajuwon better than many of his contemporaries. He combined elite rim protection with guard-like footwork and steals totals, which is why analysts still use him as the template when they describe mobile big men. His height was the platform; the movement he learned as a goalkeeper in Lagos made it decisive.

To see how he lines up next to the tallest players ever, use the height comparison tool or browse the tallest people lists.