(Still the greatest dunk of all-time… hands down)

Clyde Drexler, Spud Webb, Dominique Wilkins and Michael Jordan were the NBA superstars of the 1980′s and 90′s. Their contemporaries today are Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Carmello Anthony and LeBron James. 

Back in the old days, the All-Star Dunk Contest was a crown jewel of the NBA season. It was prime-time, must-see television. Kids everywhere mimmicked their favorite dunks in living rooms and driveways. The dunk contest used to be the shit.

So what happened?

Image happened.

Earlier this week, LeBron James officially pulled his name out of the dunk competition, effectively ending any hope I had for an exciting show. Unfortunately, this will be just another ho-hum year for the dunk contest and NBA fans will have to suffer through a roster of NBA nobodies.

This years contestants include: last year’s champ, Nate Robinson, Shannon Brown, Gerald Wallace, Eric Gordon and DeMar DeRozan.

Gerald Wallace? Eric Gordon? DeMar DeRozan? Who the fuck are these guys? Is the NBA serious about this lineup?

The excuse superstars use during All-Star weekend is that they don’t want to risk injury and jeopardize their season. In theory, that’s a legitimate excuse. However, this is the same league where players openly admit they play to entertain fans. So which is it? You can’t have it both ways.

The real reason that today’s superstars don’t compete is because they’re too big for the dunk contest and risk hurting their images. For instance, if LeBron James came in 3rd behind Shannon Brown and Eric Gordon, that would be a disaster for his image. Case in point, LeBron is so concerned with his public image that Nike confiscated a video of him getting dunked on by Xavier star, Jordan Crawford, at a summer camp (video of Lebron getting dunked on).

So what’s the solution?

It’s simple, only invite true superstars to compete.

LeBron doesn’t lose face getting beat by Kobe Bryant or Dwayne Wade in a dunk contest. Second, put the voting in the fans hands. Let us text and Twitter votes in real-time. Finally, have a sponsor provide $1 million to the winner. If the NBA gets stars, includes the fans, and provides a huge purse, then the dunk contest would become relevant again.

Keep in mid it’s not the actual dunks that will draw attention… it’s the competition among superstars that would be so much fun to watch.

I hope the NBA and it’s players come around someday, but until that pipe-dream comes true we’ll have to settle for highlights from the past… when real stars competed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 12:06 am and is filed under NBA, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Carmello Anthony, Dwayne Wade, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Michael Jordan, NBA Dunk Contest