When it comes to the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, there are two things you can count on every year.
One is that the people who follow the NBA will watch it intently, just as they do every year. The other is that many of those people will go out of their way to complain about how much they don’t like the thing they avidly watch.
The dunk contest is both the most-anticipated NBA All-Star weekend event and the one that feels like it’s constantly getting taken down a peg. Grousing about it feels almost like a rite of passage for NBA fans, an easy way to assert that they’re not philistine because they can appreciate how much better it used to be. It’s as if you’re not a true NBA fan unless you’ve nodded at the suggestion that maybe the three-point contest should replace the dunk contest as All-Star Saturday’s marquee event.
But here’s the thing with the dunk contest: It’s fine!
Is the slam dunk contest without sin? No. Big stars routinely ignore it, so the field is often a who’s who of guys who only the sickest of NBA sickos have heard of before. It isn’t ideal that every five or six years, the dunk contest is not just bad but objectively abysmal, with participants missing so many dunk attempts that the whole event comes off as something of a disaster.
In a perfect world, neither of those things would be the case. At the same time, this belies the fact that the dunk contest is fun and entertaining most of the time, as it has been the last few years. Flawed or imperfect as it might be, the event is still something we should be happy about and exists in its current incarnation.
Part of what fuels the bashing is that people often compare it to the 1980s, when Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, and Clyde Drexler competed in it. People remember those contests as the pinnacle of the competition, and they’re not wrong in terms of relevance.
What the nostalgia is clouding when people reminisce about those golden years is that the dunks in those dunk contests weren’t actually all that great. Yes, there was a gravitas to seeing Jordan or ‘Nique do what they were doing, but in terms of the quality of dunks that were being exhibited, those contests have not only been outclassed but have been outclassed for decades.
Case in point: watch this slam by J.R. Smith from the 2005 Dunk Contest. It’s a dunk that has been forgotten by time. You might not have seen it if you’re a younger NBA fan. And yet this two-decade-old irrelevant dunk is more impressive and more difficult than literally dunk any you can find from the event’s heyday (even if it did admittedly take him a couple of tries to get the timing right). And by the way, the same goes for this Jason Richardson dunk from 2004, this Paul George dunk from 2014, and this Mac McClung dunk from 2024.
Older dunk contests had more star power, but they resonated with people so much because the event was new enough that relatively basic dunks were still fresh and exciting. That is why Michael Jordan taking off from the foul line is one of the most famous dunk contest dunks ever.
By today’s standards, those dunks aren’t all that impressive. If a player dunked it from the foul line now, they’d be met with yawning indifference because we know it’s not that high of a bar to clear anymore. This forces today’s players to try to up the ante by pulling off increasingly difficult, impossible dunks to wow an audience already seeing everything in the book. It’s what’s led to modern players flailing in an attempt to pull off a miraculous dunk instead of something easier. It also goes a long way to explain why big stars avoid the event – lest they get nationally embarrassed after failing to live up to their predecessors’ very high bar.
This is what makes modern dunk contests cool to me, however. They’re a challenge. The players are put in the impossible position of escalating the wow factor to top the nostalgia of fans too spoiled to know just how good they have it. And for the most part, the contestants manage to pull it off year after year.
For all the griping about no-name guys being in the event, the fact that these “no-name guys” are willing to take on the odds and try to win over those who believe they can never top the ghosts of the past is admirable. To that end, modern dunk contestants really do feature some incredible dunks. Some of the slams Mac McClung has executed over the last few contests are some of the greatest dunks you’ll ever see in your life. The fact that he’s an also-ran NBA player shouldn’t keep you from seeing what he does.
Would the dunk contest be more compelling if Zion Williamson, Ja Morant, and Anthony Edwards were competing? Absolutely. Would it be better if players never missed a ton of attempts while trying to execute their miracle slam? Sure. But the dunk contest doesn’t need to be perfect to be watchable and entertaining.
What it currently is – when you step back and look at it from a distance – is still totally fine. The NBA Slam Dunk Contest can be a messy crapshoot, but it should be allowed to be. I’m happy that, once a year, we get to watch talented players try to pull off the coolest dunks we’ve ever seen. And if you’re a true fan of dunking, the fact that it’s Matas Buzelis and Andre Jackson Jr. doing it shouldn’t keep you from appreciating that it’s still around to be competed in at all.
The author of this article is on Bluesky at @velodus
