To begin this column, I am bitter. The greatest dunk contest of my basketball viewing lifetime happened Saturday night and I missed it.
I lived with it in spirit, saw the vines, read reactions and watched as basketball Twitter combusted into a haze of awe and approval. The NBA’s dunk contest hadn’t had a moment like that since Vince Carter in 2000.
Essentially, the dunk contest is exactly that, a moment. The dunks, which are extremely difficult and can only be performed by some of the top athletes on Earth, are often less important and impactful than the context around him.
The best recent example would be Blake Griffin versus Javale McGee in the 2011 All-Star Weekend, when Griffin dunked over a car with a choir singing “I Believe I Can Fly” behind him. Griffin jumped over the lowest part of the car – a Kia, the NBA’s official car sponsor — from relatively close to the rim. Counter to him, McGee threw down two dunks on two different rims at the same time in a way that defied physics.
Griffin’s dunk was a bigger moment, orchestrated to be extravagant and over-the-top; McGee’s dunk had a much higher level of difficulty and was significantly more impressive, but Griffin had the bigger moment, so he won.
That puts Saturday’s dunk contest on center stage. The two competitors, Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon, are two of the most athletic people in the world’s most athletic sports league. LaVine was the reigning champion and rumored to have done his “safety dunks” the year before, which included going behind the back off-the-bounce and getting high enough to give himself concussions on the rim.
This year, the dunk contest was decided by the moments, and there is no bigger moment in dunk contests than the run up to the free throw line. From the first step at the other side of the court, you know what the athlete is going to do before he jumps, but it’s impossible to believe he can do it. Only the bounciest people in the NBA have dunked from the free throw line, and the list is exclusive, limited to names like Julius Erving, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
As Zack LaVine blurred past the three-point arch and ascended one step later, his moment become bigger than any competition. He combined aerial acrobatics with his unparalleled hang time in a way that made fellow NBA players lose their collective minds.
Opposite him, Gordon threw down dunks that were more impressive, including a dunk where he sat on the ball … with the ball over seven feet in the air. Gordon performed dunks while rotating on multiple axes or extending in more degrees of motion than humans should be able to do while simultaneously being eye-level with a ten foot rim.
Could LaVine have done Gordon’s dunks? Probably. Could Gordon have done LaVine’s dunks? Less likely. However, Gordon outperformed a man who went between his legs from the charity stripe, which was his undoing. No matter the difficulty or impressiveness of what you do, a dunk is still a dunk unless it has a moment. LaVine had the best moments of the night, and that’s why he won. Fortunately, Gordon has already expressed interest in returning in 2017, so now it’s up to LaVine to return for three-peat.
What a moment that will be.
Lucas Hunter is a sophomore in journalism & electronic media. He can be reached at [email protected].
