The NBA Slam Dunk Contest doesn’t need to be saved

The most predictable reaction to NBA All-Star Weekend is the idea that the Slam Dunk Contest was boring and/or bad.

When someone like Oklahoma City Hamidou Diallo comes along and does a dunk that’s so spectacular that it takes everyone’s breath away, he is burdened with the mission of bringing the dunk contest back. Yet even when that happens, the individual brilliance is not enough. The conversation about the dunk contest positions the competition as being in an almost permanent state of disappointment, always in need of saving, and yet, always on the edge of returning to some former glory.

The former glory of the dunk contest doesn’t really exist. Great dunk contests are rare in the overall history of the event. There’s the Vince Carter show in 2000, the most iconic performance to date. Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins showed off a great collection of dunks in 1988. Spud Webb’s win in 1986 was memorable because of his 5’7 height. Most recently, the 2016 showdown between Zach LaVine and Aaron Gordon is still the most ridiculous oneupmanship ever. Aside from those few instances, there are some great dunks, like Diallo’s, scattered within years that were considered letdowns.

That means the dunk contest is burdened by an exceptional idea of itself rather than its norm. It supposedly needs to be brought back to the few times when it superseded itself, as if those rare moments were and should be the standard. Any event that’s judged by the times when everything went perfectly is naturally going to be a disappointment most of the time, because it’s hard for it to live up to myth of itself.

Critics also misunderstand, or at least fail to acknowledge, what the dunk contest is exactly and why failure is an inherent aspect of such a performance.

In contrast with Saturday’s other marquee event, the 3-Point Shootout, the dunk contest is physically and mentally demanding work. That’s not to say the 3-Point Shootout is easy: participants need an intense focus, the ability to repeat their shooting motion perfectly as they rotate around the court, and the stamina to accomplish all of that within a minute.

But where shooting is more about technical proficiency and doing the same motion well over and over, the dunk contest is about physical creativity. Players in the 3-Point Shootout aren’t tasked with coming up with new ways to shoot, but those in the dunk contest have to conjure up new dunks every year and have the physical qualities to complete them.

The 3-Point Shootout is a replication of what shooters do in practice. It’s the base of their craft. The Dunk Contest, on the other hand, is something else entirely that participants must practice on their own time. A shooter can practice put up 1,000 shots a day, but it’s physically impossible for a dunk contest participant to practice their own moves to that extent, even though they might need to in order to pull them off seamlessly.

Audiences also want to be amazed, so they judge dunkers against their fellow competitors and those from the past. No one wants to see the same dunks from different people, regardless of how great the dunks themselves are. This is why props have become so common: there’s only so many different dunks players can do with just the ball and their bodies.

The Dunk Contest is even divorced from the actual act of dunking. In actual games, players power dunk over defenders. Success is less about the creativity of the dunk and more about the physical dominance against an opponent.

Dunk contest dunks are so much harder, because the player now has to find a way to replace the awe of physical dominance with ingenuity. Whereas the 3-Point Shootout is easier than players shooting against opponents flying at them within the course of a game, dunking away from a game increases the difficulty because there are no opponents to act as reference points for the audience. Most great power dunkers in the league would be awful in the dunk contest.

Yes, the players in the dunk contest are athletic marvels, but they’re punished by the very nature of their work. Perfecting any motion, especially one like a creative dunk, involves many failures and few successes. The problem with the dunk contest is that people get to see that process as it plays out, and not the end result of that process. Some players manage to get the dunk right on their first try, but it’s never surprising to see that many of them don’t.

With all of that in mind, the idea that a dunk contest is disappointing when it’s not transcendent is both understandable and a weird position to take. Something as demanding as the dunk contest should really be judged by the greatness of the best dunks. If you view the dunkers as artists, then it’s easier to marvel at their masterpieces than sneer at the sketches that ended up in the trash bin. What we should be looking for is those transcendent moments where dunkers redefine what the human body is capable of doing. Instead, the competition sets us up to be upset that they’re not consistently achieving a near-impossible task.

Then again, the pervasive idea that the dunk contest always disappoints may be necessary to set the stage for those exceptional years. When players like Gordon and LaVine do the difficult so effortlessly, it sticks in our minds and hearts forever. If every year was like that, it’d feel boring.

Ultimately, the dunk contest simply doesn’t need to be saved. We have to see so many participants fail, to stay aware of how hard creative dunks actually are, for us to really appreciate the years when everything goes perfectly.