This year’s NBA Slam Dunk contest stunk, plain and simple.
First off, the league changed things around and took the dunk contest from an individual competition of athleticism and creative play, to a confusing East verses West face-off, which didn’t make any sense at all.
For those who’ve followed the contest for the last 30 years or so, they’ll remember watching each contestant try to out-dunk each other, while taking the necessary amount of time to figure out what he was going to do.
But this year the NBA had three players dunking simultaneously for most of the competition, which made it very confusing, because it was hard to watch all three players at once. Plus, each dunk was rushed, which took away from the level of anticipation.
All and all the entire thing seemed extremely unorganized and chaotic.
But despite all of that, Washington Wizard guard John Wall put on a pretty decent show, and won the fan choice for best “Dunker of the Night.” And the East took the team portion of the competition, which besides Wall, included Terrence Ross of the Toronto Raptors, and Indiana Pacers guard Paul George.
Another thing that made this year’s dunk contest so awful was the fact that most of the players missed their first two or three dunks, so by the time they actually got the ball in the basket, it came off extremely anticlimactic–because you would think it would be easy for a ridiculously tall person to dunk a basketball, especially when there’s nobody guarding him.
The best event of the night was clearly the Three Point Shootout that came right before the dunk competition, and although it failed to capture the same type of excitement as previous NBA three-point-competitions, it was still pretty fun to watch.
Hopefully, the NBA has learned a lesson from last night and will decide to return to the dunk contest’s original format, because although the contests of the past weren’t perfect, they were organized, which is a lot more than I can say about last night’s fiasco. It was really horrible.
Image via YouTube
