Shaedon Sharpe was born to dunk a basketball. The Portland Trail Blazers’ wing is having a career season as a scorer with 22 points per game, but he’s still not quite as efficient as the team would like with -2.0 percent relative true shooting percentage to league average. Sharpe is still figuring things out as a 22-year-old in his fourth NBA season, but the one thing he can do for sure is explode off the ground to finish plays above the basket. There might not be a better leaper in the league than Sharpe, and he proved it again with one of the greatest dunks of his career.
Shaedon Sharpe shattered his own NBA vertical leap record with dunk on Russell Westbrook
No one jumps higher in the modern NBA than Shaedon Sharpe.
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
About a year ago, Sharpe broke the NBA record for the highest vertical leap in a game by exploding 45.1 inches off the Earth for a thunderous alley-oop finish against the Utah Jazz. On Saturday, Sharpe shattered his own record for the highest in-game vertical leap with a baseline attack that led to a poster dunk on Russell Westbrook and the Sacramento Kings.
According to the NBA’s tracking data, Sharpe jumped 47.2 inches off the ground for this dunk. Watch the play here:
Westbrook knows something about putting people on a poster, but he got caught here. When Sharpe gets a clear runway and full head of steam towards the basket, there’s just no stopping him without elite rim protection.
How impressive is Sharpe’s 47.2 inch vertical? The second highest in-game dunk this year belongs to Derrick Jones Jr., who got 42 inches off the ground. No one else this season has broken the 40 inch vertical barrier. Sharpe had four of the five highest leaps for in an-game dunk last season, and now he’s set a new record this year.
Here’s another view of Sharpe’s dunk on Westbrook from inside the arena. He damn near hurdled him:
When Sharpe was in the 2022 Draft, I described him as a “mystery box of tools.” That still seems like the case even in year four, but hey, he’s still only 22. The Blazers really need Sharpe to take another leap if they want to get out of no man’s land in the West. For now, just enjoy the dunks.
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