The Quest for Perfection
A Five-Step Process for Fixing All Star Saturday's Main Event
2/15/04
Just finished watching the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, and I can't remember the last time I felt so cheated by a strict adherence to the rules. Owing to a rule that says that competitors can only replace one missed dunk attempt out of their two dunks per round, the finals of the contest ended in a disturbingly anti-climactic fashion, as neither Fred Jones nor Jason Richardson completed their final dunk. Because of the rules, they weren't even allowed to try, so the dunk contest ended, somewhat symbolically, on a hard brick.
And it wasn't just the finals that flopped -- the entire contest had an air of disappointment that was only briefly interrupted by a few individual displays of brilliance. Even one of the most spectacular dunks ever -- an alley-oop, through the legs windmill by Richardson that literally compelled me, and no doubt many others, to jump out of my seat -- couldn't save a deeply flawed event. The most frustrating thing about this situation is that a few stupid rules are bringing the event down. It makes you wonder why, with so many intelligent basketball minds behind this, they can't seem to get it right. The good news is that with a little bit of tweaking, the event can be fixed.
On the heels of that optimistic sentiment, Instant-Replays.com is setting out to make things right. Here are five changes that would go a long way towards bringing the dunk contest back to its past glory, and on into the future:
1. Bring Back the Stars
It's called the Rising Stars Slam Dunk Contest (soda company sponsor name intentionally omitted), but that's a boldfaced lie. For whatever reason, the league has decided to make the dunk contest only open to players with three years or less of experience, and the only logical reason for this is that they find it much easier to deal with young, relatively unestablished players. Maybe they're sick of being embarrassed by high-profile stars turning them down and saying they don't want to participate -- I don't know. What I do know is that the real embarrassment is trying to pass off whoever you can get to participate as "rising stars." I mean, really, does anyone consider Fred Jones to be a rising star? Sure, he's a good dunker, but the dude is averaging 17 minutes and 4 points per game this year. A star, he is not. And it makes a difference. Even though some of Jones' dunks were impressive, the fact that he and another guy half the country hasn't heard of (Chris Anderson) made up half of the competition's participants made the whole thing lack credibility. At times it felt like watching a college slam dunk contest, albeit one with better cameras and flashier uniforms. And that was infuriating.
At the peak of this frustration, a friend of mine came out of nowhere with a very simple, and very good idea that, for whatever reason, I hadn't heard before. It seemed so obvious that I had to wonder whether or not he came up with it himself: let the fans choose who participates in the dunk contest. We as fans may be relatively incapable of choosing who should start the all-star game because we often value style over substance (hence Vince Carter always being voted a starter no matter how well he's playing or how many games he's missed), but that's exactly why we'd be great at picking the dunk contest participants. Allow us to vote on it and the dunk contest will once again have the big-ticket names it so sorely needs: Vince, Kobe, T-Mac, Steve Francis. And the great thing about voting them in is, no one would have to worry about them opting out of the contest. If you make it a fan vote and one of the stars voted in chooses to sit out, it's going to come across as an insult to the fans. Not to say I'm so naive that I think the players are unwilling to insult the fans, but you get the point. Vote them in and they'll feel a lot more compelled to participate.
2. Impose a Maximum Height
If you watched last night's dunk contest, this should be self-explanatory. No one taller than 6-8 should be allowed to participate. The reason? Their dunks just don't look as good. Part of the mystique of the dunk contest is seeing human beings accomplish feats that seem to truly defy all possibility. We want to see things that blow our mind, and a great dunk can do just that. During last night's telecast, Kenny Smith said of Richardson that his dunks looked like he was a video game character because he was doing things that didn't seem possible. This illusion exists because, relatively speaking, Richardson isn't all that tall, so when he elevates, he's in the air for longer, and it looks better.
The problem with tall guys is, no matter what kind of vertical they have or how much power they dunk with, it simply doesn't look as good because they don't have to jump as high to get to the rim. Last night, the 6-10 Anderson's first dunk, a two-handed reverse windmill, was actually quite impressive, but it only got a 42 out of 50 from the judges. The only explanation I can think of is that Anderson's height created the wrong kind of illusion to the judges. Whereas a shorter player often looks like he's flying towards the rim, a taller player doesn't look he's up that high. And truthfully, Anderson's dunk was about as good a dunk as I can remember seeing from a big guy. The same was true of Shawn Kemp when he was in the dunk contest (of course I'm talking about Kemp before he astonishingly went home one offseason and morphed into The Nutty Professor). Back then, before he inflated to 300-plus pounds, Kemp had an awesome vertical and was dunking with authority in the contest. During live game action it would have been awesome, but in terms of what we are hoping to see in the dunk contest, the magic just wasn't there.
The other benefit of imposing a maximum height on participants is that, were the NBA ever to wisen up and allow the fans to vote players into the contest, a limit of 6-8 would keep buffoons from voting in their favorite players like Shaq and Yao Ming who, while obviously entertaining, would be absolutely awful to watch in a dunk contest for reasons explained above.
In case you're wondering why I chose 6-8 as the maximum height instead of, say, 6-6, let's just say I don't want to discourage a certain Orlando Magic forward from participating should we wisen up and choose to let the real stars back in the door.
3. Expand the Field
Part of the reason I felt cheated by last night's contest is that there wasn't enough dunking. And I'm not just talking about the fact that the contest was allowed to end on two consecutive missed dunks. With only four players participating and a paltry two dunks per round, there simply wasn't enough throwing down. (As a completely unrelated side note, can we please eliminate the word "jamming" from the lexicon of dunk terminology? I was trying to think of different words for dunk, and I'm pretty sure that this is by far the lamest one. Does anything make you sound less cool these days than saying, "Dude, he's one of the best jammers in the league!") Getting back to the point, I couldn't help but come away with the feeling that we the viewers were being rushed through the whole event as fast as possible. In fact, calling it an event seems almost too generous. More than anything, it was a horrible tease. My main question is, what's the big hurry? Why only four competitors? Why only two dunks per round? Why allow a missed dunk to count towards a competitor's score? I promise you, people who are tuning in to the dunk contest are not going to shut it off if you add extra people. We're in it for the long haul, until the bitter, and often disappointing end. The bigger the quantity, the better chance there is for quality. Please just give us more.
4. And as for Those Missed Dunks...
This one ties directly into what I just mentioned a moment ago. In case you didn't see the dunk contest, allow me briefly to explain the travesty that was the Missed Dunk Policy. As you know by now if you've been paying any attention to this article (which I understand is not guaranteed), each contestant was allowed two dunks per round. If the contestant missed a dunk (i.e. bricked it off the rim), he could do that dunk over once. But if he missed another dunk after that, he was forced to be judged on the merits of that second missed dunk, which is pretty stupid for obvious reasons. Most missed dunks don't look that cool, and they certainly aren't satisfying to the crowd.
But fear not, sports fans, there's a simple solution to this problem also! Instead of only allowing one do-over on a missed dunk per round, why not allow an unlimited number of do-overs and simply dock points off the participant's score for each one? Say you took off two or three points for each missed dunk. Or take off five if you feel like it; it really doesn't matter. The point is, this way, the competitors are discouraged from missing dunk after dunk after dunk, but at the same time we the fans are ensured that the contest won't end on a miss as it did last night.
5. Give the Judges Protection
Pardon me for being so blunt, but the judges for the dunk contest are total sluts. Any time they so much as sniff a remotely good dunk, they're instantly up on their feet holding up the perfect 10 signs. Despite being somewhat comical in that it leaves the judges with about as much credibility as a pastor with a nose ring, this is a problem. Case in point: the three dunks that got perfect scores last night, two by Jones and one by Richardson, could not have had more of a disparity between them. Jones' two "perfect" 50's were both nice dunks, but the second one was significantly better and more difficult than the first. Furthermore, neither one of them had a truly astonishingly high degree of difficulty (to Jones' credit, his second dunk was pretty nice, as he caught a difficult lob pass way behind his head and slammed it home with one hand). That said, neither of those dunks even came close to touching Richardson's 50, an absolute work of art and probably the best dunk the contest has seen since Vince Carter's awe-inspiring reverse 360 windmill in 2000. Yet it got the same score as Jones' dunks, which just isn't right.
The problem for the judges (other than the fact that they can't keep their proverbial trousers zipped) is that they don't have enough options when giving out scores. Not to jock Kenny Smith too hard here, but he made another wise suggestion during last night's broadcast. As The Jet aptly pointed out, we need to implement a scoring system with half numbers as opposed to just whole ones (as it is, judges can only give whole-number scores, such as 8, 9 or 10 and can't give out 9.5's, for example). With a half-number system in place, perhaps when judges see a good dunk, they won't feel so compelled to "whip out" their 10, as it were. Instead they could give good dunks 9's, great dunks 9.5's, and they could save their 10's for the truly transcendent.
Which is really all we're looking for in the first place.
-Matt Stroup Copyright ©2004 instant-replays.com
