Thursday, January 14, 2010

NBA introduces dinky new dunk contest twist.

The grand finale of the NBA's All-Star Saturday Night, the slam dunk contest, is a simple premise. You get a few guys together, they dunk in a competitive format, and whoever has the highest score at the end wins. Simple, right? And yet, we all enjoy watching it. So why is it, then, that the NBA keeps fiddling with it? This time around, there's going to be some dopey gimmick called a "dunk-in." At halftime of the Rookies vs. Sophomores game on February 12th, Eric Gordon of the Clippers and Demar Derozan of the Raptors will have two minutes to make two dunks. When they've done that, the fans will vote via text messaging and the winner will round out the field of four dunkers in the dunk contest the following night.

So here's my question: why not just have both Gordon and Derozan be in the actual slam dunk contest and have five people participate? Wouldn't that make better sense than just a mini-dunk contest? I remember a couple years ago Dwight Howard wanted to do a dunk on a 12-foot goal, but the NBA wouldn't let him because it wouldn't conform to regulation conditions. And then they come up with this.

But this isn't even the worst idea they've had. Remember the 2002 contest? In that one, they had a format that all the players had to follow- a dunk on their own, a dunk with a teammate, and a dunk from The Wheel. You remember The Wheel, don't you? When you spun it, you had a chance of getting a Michael Jordan dunk, a Julius Erving dunk, a Dominique Wilkins dunk, an 80's dunk, a 90's dunk, or a mystery dunk. It was a waste of a perfectly good wheel and none of the players could duplicate the dunks. Take Steve Francis for example, who got stuck having to do Terence Stansbury's famous "Statue of Liberty" dunk. Stevie couldn't even palm the ball, and now he's having to do the "Statue of Liberty." He failed miserably:



Am I overreacting, or is this something that everyone things is silly? I guess it doesn't really matter since it is just the dunk contest but still, I hate when they do crap like this.

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