Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, sat down and went through every single dunk from all four group stages of Shaq’s DunkMan League. Twenty-four dunkers, four groups of six, and the winner of the finals takes home $500,000, which is the biggest prize in the history of dunking. We wanted this out before the championship, so we did all four in one sitting. In hindsight we probably should have done it week by week.

I competed in Group Stage D. Travis and I were also in the building for Group Stage A, which we recorded a whole separate episode about on the drive home. If you want the background on how I got into the league in the first place, that is episode 70.

The format, and the scoring people keep asking about

Each group stage is two rounds. First round is three dunks with two attempts each. They drop your lowest score and average your best two, and the top three advance. The final round is two dunks, two attempts, and only your single best dunk counts.

The judges are five working professional dunkers, not celebrities. They score across seven weighted categories, drop the highest and lowest judge, and average the middle three. Crowd reaction is a small slice of it, somewhere around three percent. Attempt number matters, so a second-try make scores below a first-try make, and a miss scores low but not zero.

For calibration: anything above an 8.0 is a very solid dunk and anything above a 9.0 is crazy. You also only get one prop dunk per round, which includes Dubble Ups, and there are no redos. If you make a dunk on the first attempt, you cannot use the second attempt to try to make it better.

Group Stage A: Cam Hazzard, in his first ever contest

Doug Anderson opened the entire league with a Windmill Elbow off a hand-off that he caught halfway up his bicep, first try, for an 8.36. He made all three of his dunks and still did not advance, which tells you how deep this group was.

Dengxing Chen went over six people on a Dubble Up Eastbay for a 9.31, the highest of the round. He is 39 and a legitimate 5’9″. Joel Henry put me on Avante Nichols’s shoulders for a Tetris that scored 8.85, then hit a Reverse 360 Eastbay off a lob for an 8.73, then in the final round jumped over me while I was sitting on a car for an 8.87.

Cam Hazzard opened with a Reverse 360 Windmill where the ball hit the ground before he did, missed both attempts on a 360 Eastbay after slipping on a warmup jump. In the final he did a 360 pump into a full Tomahawk down the middle for a 9.55, which took Dunk of the Night and the group. He went home with $35,000 on his first ever competition.

Group Stage B: Dillan McCarthy

This was the hardest group to call going in. Mason Baker opened with a slingshot for an 8.09 and later killed a cuff Windmill Elbow, the same dunk he went for on the original DunkMan show, and this time it stuck perfectly.

Jonathan Clark hit his Whirlwind, a 360 where he flips the ball off the backboard from his left hand to his right mid-spin. Watching it with my family, a couple of them asked what he had even done. That is the exact argument for having professional dunkers judging, because a general audience is not going to catch it. He later hit Jonathan’s Wall for an 8.94 and took Dunk of the Night and $10,000.

Tyler Currie brought out the dunk he calls the Ghost, which I have also heard called the Crystal Ball, for an 8.08. It is one of those dunks that reads better the closer you are standing to it.

Dillan McCarthy took the group. He jumps 52 inches, and the wild part is that he hit an Eastbay off the backboard on his off plant for an 8.75, on a pass that was not perfect, and it looked casual. He does almost everything right-left. In the final he punched an Underboth for an 8.9, a dunk he has gotten dramatically better at in the last six months to a year, and that won it and $25,000. He also went for an Eastbay Elbow, which nobody has landed in a contest yet, and got close enough that it is clearly within reach for him.

Group Stage C: Isaiah Rivera

New Williams hit a dunk off the backboard first try for an 8.71, and the timing on that one is much harder than it looks.

Hyrum Fechser took Dunk of the Night in this group and $10,000 with a brand new dunk over his wife. Darius Clark came from the free throw line and put down a Reverse 360 Eastbay with a hand on his hip, which made the whole thing look completely effortless.

Isaiah Rivera won it. In the final round he went behind the back over somebody, which scored very highly and secured the group. He had barely dunked left-right in the month before this, which makes that finish even more impressive. He took the group and $25,000.

Group Stage D: my own group

My group had three-time NBA dunk contest champion Mac McClung in it, which as far as I know is the first time we have seen an NBA player move into professional dunking like this. Jordan Southerland also came in last minute to replace Antonio Eaglan, which moved him to the two seed in the group and moved me down to three.

Brandon Ruffin opened with a Dubble Up tap reverse for a 7.45. Marlow Gilmore had been dunking for about an hour that same morning and then went and hit an 8.3 in the contest, which I could not do. If I took a one-hour session the day of a contest I would not be jumping anywhere near my best.

My three dunks were a Dubble Up X over somebody on a chair, a Hand-Off 180 Eastbay, and then the Inverted Scorpion Over Someone in the final round, which scored a 9.28. The reasoning on the first one was simple: I wanted something that was still tough and still looked good, but that I knew I would land, because getting a make on the board early does a lot for your confidence. The Inverted Scorpion is my dunk. Nobody else is doing it over a person.

Mac won the group and took Dunk of the Night. I finished with enough to take a wild card spot as the six seed, so I am in the championship.

The finals bracket

Seeds one through four are the group winners, ranked by their best score in their own final round. Seeds five through eight are the four highest-scoring dunkers who did not win a group.

Mac McClung is the one seed, Cam Hazzard is two, Isaiah Rivera is three, Dillan McCarthy is four, Jordan Southerland is five, I am six, Joel Henry is seven and Dengxing Chen is eight. First round is Mac against Chen, Cam against Joel, me against Isaiah, and Dillan against Southerland.

The whole thing runs in one night, head to head, single elimination. Two dunks, two attempts, best dunk wins the matchup. That format means people are going to try things they would never risk in a normal contest, because you only need to land one. Shaq also said at the Fanatics Fest press conference that as commissioner he can raise the prize money on the night if he sees something he has never seen before.

Where this leaves dunking

A few years ago there was no version of this. You trained, you hoped an event came along, and there was no guarantee it would. Now there is a night where somebody walks away with half a million dollars for dunking a basketball. Travis and I both went from being fairly pessimistic about where the sport was heading to being about as optimistic as it is possible to be, and it happened quickly.

We will be back to break down the finals once they air. If you want the version of Group Stage A from inside the arena, with what it looked like standing under the rim, that is the episode we recorded in the car, with Ben Hopkins along for the drive.

Out of all four group stages of Shaq’s DunkMan League, Group Stage A was the one I wanted to see most. Six dunkers, one night in Atlanta, and on paper it was the deepest group of the four. So Ben Hopkins, Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, drove four hours from North Carolina to OTE Arena to watch it, and then recorded this entire episode on the drive back with three hours still to go.

I am in the league myself, which is how we ended up on the court instead of in the stands. I talked about signing with DunkMan back in episode 70, and Cam Hazzard came on the podcast right after he tested a 50-inch vertical and got his own invite, which is episode 71. Both of those were before any of this existed as a real event. This one is what it actually looked like from under the rim.

How the DunkMan League is set up

Shaq ran The Dunk King years ago, brought it back last year as a one-off DunkMan show, and this year turned it into the first professional dunking league. There are 24 dunkers from around the world, split into four group stages of six, one per week.

Each group stage runs in two rounds. In the first round you get three dunks with two attempts each, they drop your lowest score, and the average of your best two decides who advances. Three go through. In the final round you get two dunks, two attempts, and only your best dunk counts. So technically you only need two good dunks in the first round and one great one in the last.

The winner of each group stage goes to the championship, plus the four next-highest scorers across all four stages as wild cards, which makes eight in the final. That format is a big deal, because dropping your lowest score means you can afford to swing at something you might miss. I am a fan of it for exactly that reason.

Doug Anderson opened it with a Windmill Elbow

First dunk of the entire league, first attempt: Doug Anderson took a hand-off and punched a Windmill Elbow so hard he got it halfway up his bicep. It barely qualifies as an elbow at that point. If you have ever caught the rim above your elbow you know that is a completely different level of pain than catching it on the forearm.

He followed it with an Eastbay and a J-Rich, and he punched both of them the way he punches everything. He made all three of his dunks and still went home. That is how stacked this group was.

Chen is 39, a legit 5’9″, and went over six people

Dengxing Chen is the one I had wanted to see in person for years. He is 39 years old and genuinely 5’9″. We stood next to him and he might even be 5’8″. Seeing someone that size take off from one foot the way he does is different in person.

His big one was a Dubble Up Eastbay over six people, which scored a 9.31 and was the highest of the first round. For him six is a low number. He normally goes over seven, eight, nine, and I am pretty sure I have seen him do ten. Travis compared his hand speed to Smoove, which is fair, and he covers distance on a double up better than anyone.

Joel Henry used me for two of his dunks

Joel Henry came over from the UK and I had never met him before that night. He walked up, greeted me like he already knew who I was, and by the end of the night it felt like we had been friends for a while.

He also put me in two of his dunks. The first was a Tetris, where I was sitting on Avante Nichols’s shoulders and Joel went over both of us. It felt sketchy up there and I was not balanced at all, but he cleared it with so much room he honestly could have crowned it. The second one, in the final round, was a Dubble Up over me while I was sitting on a car. That one was not on my list of things I expected to do that day. I was less scared for me and more scared for him, because if you catch a foot on a car that is a real problem. He had to twist his body sideways in the air to avoid landing on it.

My favorite dunk of his, and maybe my favorite of the night, was a Reverse 360 Eastbay off a lob that he caught one-handed and finished straight down. Lobs in a contest are much harder than lobs in a session because of the adrenaline and the crowd, which is exactly why most guys pick hand-offs and double ups where the ball is already sitting still. Going up off a lob with that much confidence and then doing a dunk that technical was the most impressive thing he did all night.

Cam Hazzard’s first ever dunk contest

The part that still does not fully make sense is that this was Cam Hazzard’s first dunk competition ever, and he did it at what was probably the biggest dunk event that has ever happened.

In warmups he walked up and did a Reverse 360 Eastbay like it was a layup, hand speed slow, dropped it in. Then a double elbow off a drop step. Then his first dunk of the night was a Reverse 360 Windmill where the ball hit the floor before he landed. He completed the whole motion on the way up, paused at the top, and threw it down from there.

His second dunk did not go down. He slipped on a jump that did not count as an attempt, then went for a 360 Eastbay twice. Coming back from a slip like that in the middle of a round is genuinely hard. He came back and hit a 360 Inverter first try, which is his go-to, and that was enough to put him in the final.

Then he closed it. A 360 pump into a full Tomahawk down the middle, starting from around the extended left elbow so it was really more than a 360. He pumped it all the way down like a reverse pump, brought it all the way back up, got full extension on the Tomahawk, and had about a foot of room to spare. It scored a 9.55, took Dunk of the Night, and won the group on the spot. Chen and Joel had already gone, and neither of their remaining dunks got close.

That dunk is the one Travis and I kept coming back to, because nobody does it. I have hit a pump Tomahawk a couple of times and the pump is the easy part. Getting full extension on the Tomahawk after a 360 is a different thing entirely.

How the scoring worked

The scoring got the most questions in the comments, so here is what it actually is. Five judges, all former professional dunkers, not celebrities. They drop the highest and lowest score and average the middle three. Crowd reaction is a small piece of it, around three percent. Attempt number counts, so a second-attempt make scores lower than a first-attempt make. Misses score low but not zero, which I think is right, because some misses are better than others.

Ben called it the best-scored event he has ever seen, and the closest to how he would score it himself. I agreed with basically every outcome. There were no perfect 10s all night, which sounds like a negative and is not. Once a contest starts handing out 10s early, nothing later in the night can feel bigger.

It is a detailed system, and the detail is the point. It rewarded difficulty and execution the way it should, and it stayed consistent from the first dunk of the night to the last.

Go watch dunkers in person

The thing all three of us kept saying on the drive back is that watching this in person is not the same as watching clips. Online you get desensitized. You see a dunk on a rim you cannot verify, on a phone screen, in between fifty other videos, and you scroll. Standing under the rim you get the speed and the power and how much room somebody actually had, and it lands completely differently.

Ben’s whole career comes from this. He loved dunking for years without thinking he could be a pro, until Isaiah Rivera and Jordan Southerland did a contest an hour and a half from him. He went, watched them in person, realized Isaiah is close to his own height and reach, and decided it was actually possible. He started training seriously a week before he turned 17 and has been a professional for a few years now.

The other half of it is meeting people. DunkMan did not have to put non-competing dunkers on the court, run a rehearsal that local dunkers could come to, or let fans walk up to Shaq afterward, and they did all three. Every dunker I have met in person has been a good guy, and you already have one thing in common with them before you say anything.

What’s next

Group Stage B is next week, then C, then D, which is the one I am in. The championship is eight dunkers: the four group winners plus four wild cards. If you want the full dunk-by-dunk with the scores, Travis and I went through every dunk from all four group stages separately.

Thanks to Ben and Travis for making the drive and hopping on the mic in the car, and to DunkMan for how they treated everybody who showed up.

Ninety seconds, two dunkers, one camera, and no host questions that anybody rehearsed. I put Polish dunker Piotr Zawiślak and Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney next to each other at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City and asked them what they thought of each other. What came back is the most useful ninety seconds of tape I got all week, because these two are good at almost completely different things.

Piotr is an eighteen-year-old from Poland who just won the camp’s ten-foot contest. Nate is a 5’7″ creator from Omaha who won the low rim title at this camp in 2025 and is widely considered the best mini hoop dunker who has ever lived. They do not compete for the same slots. Which is exactly why their opinions of each other are worth something.

Nate on Piotr: The Youngest Black Band Ever

“Piotr is the youngest athlete to ever get a black band, which is the most prestigious level of dunking, and he’s the youngest to do it.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Band ranking is how this community has sorted itself for years. Black is the top of it and the list of people who hold one is short enough to name. It normally arrives late in a career, after a decade of sessions and a couple of knee problems. Piotr got there at eighteen.

Nate did not stop at the credential. He went straight to the receipts from that week.

“He just won the ten foot contest at Dunk Camp. He went crazy. His style’s nuts. He hit a 360 Underboth, which is one of the most elite dunks in the entire world.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

A 360 Underboth is a full rotation with the ball passing under both legs mid-spin. It is a two-part dunk where the second part begins while you have no idea where the rim is. Very few people on earth throw it in a contest setting. Piotr throws it as his signature.

Piotr on Nate: Nobody Better on a Low Rim

“That’s the best low rim dunker I’ve ever seen. He can do everything. Every dunk you can imagine, Hoopin Nate can do.”

Piotr Zawiślak

This is a ten-foot specialist grading a low rim specialist, which is the part I want people to notice. The community argues about low rim constantly. There is a permanent comment section debate about whether a lowered goal counts. A guy who just won the ten-foot contest saying nobody is better than Nate on a low rim settles more of that argument than any of us shouting at each other online.

Then Piotr added the detail that actual dunkers care about.

“he’s got right hand, left hand. Everything, so I think in the future… Right now he’s crazy, but I feel like in a few years, you are gonna be one of the best dunkers.”

Piotr Zawiślak

Ambidexterity is the most undervalued trait in this sport. Nearly everybody has a dominant side and a side they hide. Nate throws the same trick both directions and it looks identical either way, which doubles his contest list and makes his practice hours worth twice what mine are.

Piotr Also Watched Him on the Regulation Rim

“So I’ve seen Nate jumping with me on ten feet. He was going crazy.”

Piotr Zawiślak

He listed an Eastbay, a 360 windmill and a reverse windmill, all on ten feet, in the same session. That should reset how people file Nate. The public still thinks of him as the mini hoop guy because that is where a billion views came from, and the work has moved on without the label.

He trained with Isaiah Rivera in Florida in 2025 and came back with six new ten-foot tricks. He put down a 360 windmill and a 9 foot Eastbay Hide and Seek at this camp. Somebody who is 5’7″ doing full windmill variations on a regulation rim is a different athlete than the one in the kitchen clips, and it takes the audience a few years to catch up to that.

The Answer That Actually Separates Pros

I asked both of them what they found most inspiring about the other’s technique. Nate’s answer had nothing to do with a specific dunk.

“The most inspiring thing is he can hit everything within like one or two tries, and that’s so important in the dunking world, especially with contests and to be exciting in shows.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

Every dunker reading this just nodded. Attempts are the hidden variable in the entire sport. A clip proves you did it once. It says nothing about whether you did it on the second try or the sixtieth, and the internet has trained an entire audience to think there is no difference.

There is an enormous difference the moment money is involved. A contest gives you two attempts and a shot clock. A halftime show gives you one run and a crew that needs the floor back. If your best dunk takes fifteen tries, you cannot sell it, you can only post it. Nate backed that up with the specific number.

“He hits 360 inverter first try almost every time.”

Nathaniel “Hoopin Nate” Kenney

That is a bookable athlete. Every promoter in this sport is buying the same thing, which is the confidence that the guy will land it while the lights are on.

Two Specialists, No Overlap, No Reason to Lie

Dunkers rating each other usually comes with an asterisk. If two guys are chasing the same contest checks, praise gets careful. These two are not in that position. Nate is the reference point on low rims and mini hoops. Piotr is a ten-foot power and creativity guy who just beat a deep field on a regulation goal.

So each of them is grading a discipline they do not own, out loud, with a camera running, and neither one hedged. Nate said the sky’s the limit for this kid and said it twice. Piotr said Nate will be one of the best dunkers in a few years and said it directly to his face rather than about him.

Piotr flew to a FIBA event one week after camp with that on tape behind him. Nate flew home with a black band dunker on record about his low rim work. Both of those are worth more than another highlight reel.

Where the Rest of This Lives

Both guys wrote their own versions. Piotr’s is at the best low rim dunker he has ever seen. Nate’s is at why Piotr is the youngest black band ever. Their sites now link to each other, which is the point of doing it this way.

The first time I met Piotr in person is covered in two of the best 18-year-old dunkers meeting. Dunker Spotlight broke down why mutual endorsement works, Athlete Spotlight ran it past dunking in vouching for each other on camera, and BlitzMetrics covered the search mechanics in reciprocal credibility between two experts.

This footage exists because Dennis Yu and I taught a session at camp on how athletes show up on Google and in AI tools, then offered to film anyone who wanted it. That system is documented in the 76 athlete repurposing writeup.

Get the two people in your gym who are good at different things in front of one camera and ask them about each other. It takes ninety seconds and it beats anything either of them could say about themselves.

This is episode 68 of the Dunk Talk Podcast: the annual NBA dunk contest autopsy, now a tradition after last year’s edition with Donovan. I’m Dylan Haugen, 18 now, joined by Travis Reynolds (who introduced himself as a 43-year-old professional dunker, which we’re leaving in). The 2026 contest had no stars, no Mac McClung, fresh judging crimes, and one genuinely beautiful dunk, and then Mac dropped four dunks on Instagram that were better than the entire event. We watched all of it on camera; here’s the written record. (This one’s best on YouTube, where you can see what we’re reacting to, and where the mid-react ads tormented us. Someone donate us Premium.)

The field, with our scores next to theirs

• Carter Bryant opened with the most aesthetic 360 of the night, huge space, slightly long, finish caught on the rim, and got a stingy 45.6 from judges who then spent the rest of the contest handing out 47s. I had Carter winning beforehand off his warmup clips, and his later Eastbay, started from practically the center circle, was punched with real authority, though scored bafflingly above the night’s best dunk.
• Jace Richardson (son of J-Rich, the man the J Rich dunk is named after, which is great lineage content) hit a reverse Windmill, slightly under the basket, modest extension, on his second attempt, and got a 48-49. Our ruling: if attempts count, and they should, the first guy’s dunk was clearly better. We’d have given a 45.
• The Mailman tribute (a dunk Southerland fans recognized instantly; Travis and I both called it from the approach angle) was genuinely cool and genuinely hard to score across the one-foot/two-foot divide.
• Jaxson Hayes was the heartbreak. His college free-throw-line Windmill footage had me expecting fireworks; instead a stuttered, ruined approach turned his big dunk into a two-step free-throw-line attempt, and instead of stopping and resetting, he played through it: the cardinal contest sin. The judges gave the wreckage a 44.6, within a point of clean dunks, which is the 40-point-floor disease intact for another year. Our score: 42, generously.
• The Eastbay off one foot from the Lakers’ backup big was the night’s technicality-versus-television case study: a legitimately rare dunk that, at full speed to a casual eye, reads as a soft layup-Eastbay. The broadcast crowd shrugged; the dunkers gasped. Both reactions were correct, which is the whole judging problem in one dunk.
• The best dunk of the contest (a head-at-rim monster from the Spurs’ athlete, foreshadowed by an even better warmup clip) somehow scored below Carter’s regular Eastbay, and a straight Windmill elsewhere got a 50, violating our standing rule: leave room on the scale for something better, always.

Recurring sins we logged: choreographed dancing burning shot-clock (multiple dunkers lost 15-20 seconds to bits), early-starting clocks, and the floor-of-40 scoring that makes every contest a coin flip between 44 and 50. Our standing affection also held: there is something purely joyful about NBA-grade athletes just jumping as high as they can and punching things, and the contest delivers that even when the judging doesn’t.

Contest craft corner: control the room

The Hayes disaster produced a practical tip for everyone doing smaller contests: in non-NBA settings, you can often manage the contest: ask for the redo on a botched approach, declare a wild lob a practice throw, clarify attempt rules with the judges beforehand. Not gamesmanship, just communication; organizers at local events almost always work with you. And if you truly can’t reset mid-air: do something, throw it off the backboard, improvise the LeBron save, because the half-effort completion scores worse than the creative bail. Travis and I have both lived this.

The Mac McClung drop: four dunks better than the contest

While the contest aired, Mac posted four new dunks, and the comment sections calling them “not that crazy” require correction, because three of the four are among the rarest dunks ever filmed:

1. An Inverted Scorpion: a motion so rare that Kilganon is essentially the only person to hit the pure version on 10’ (mine is the push-off variant), and Mac commented that he got this one for me, which I will be insufferable about indefinitely. Kilganon’s video called it “a Dylan dunk.” I did not invent the Scorpion. I am keeping the comment anyway.
2. The flexibility one (Travis and I audited our own hips on camera and concluded neither of us can do it): a motion neither of us has truly landed in a lifetime of low-rimming.
3. The Eastbay two-hand reverse off the dribble: his old signature, hit since high school, never done in an NBA contest, and watching it from a guy literally an inch taller than me recalibrates what I think I’m allowed to attempt.
4. The Lost and Found: which the haters dismissed with “you just have to get the pass and timing right,” an objection that describes every dunk ever performed. (“The double Eastbay is easy, you just transfer at the right time.” Thank you, professor.) His visible celebration suggests it took a real grind, and it has absolutely never been done in an NBA contest.

Our shared wishlist: Mac back in the contest doing exactly these (one no-prop dunk last year would have silenced the push-off discourse entirely), and someday his 720, because his 540s finish with hang-and-keep-spinning room, the single coolest way a spin dunk can end, the way Kilganon does it, the way I exaggerated mine in that 2024 9’ contest. The man is, functionally, a pro dunker employed by basketball, and the contest is poorer every year he sits out.

That wraps the sweep of this year’s All-Star Saturday. Drop your scores and Mac takes in the comments; we read everything. Next up: a content-and-social-media episode with Travis, filming in the next couple of weeks. Subscribe with notifications on so you catch it. See you in the next one.

This is episode 61 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, and Ben Hopkins is back to tell the story everyone at Dunk Camp 2025 watched in real time and Instagram called “a movie”: he won the 10’ contest, and the FIBA 3×3 Edmonton invite that comes with it, on a knee he knew was going to fail, with a pain budget he set at eight out of ten and then spent. I competed in the same contest (my own recap is in episode 60), and Ben’s win was the most dramatic thing that happened all week. Required disclaimer before the story: this is documentation, not a recommendation. Don’t do what Ben did.

The setup: rehabbing into camp, and a day one that cost too much

Ben’s knee story started a month before camp: he switched training cycles to make his rotating Jump Master schedule land on Saturday group sessions, and the change lit up his patellar tendinopathy. The rehab plan back was disciplined: off-vert jumps only, no running approaches, leg extension isos, wall sits even on rest days, and the hardest discipline of all, doing less. His final pre-camp session at 60 percent effort still flared the knee the next day, so he flew to Utah genuinely unsure what was possible.

Then day one happened, and adrenaline rewrote the plan: Ben had his best jumping day ever. Head fully above the rim on a height check for the first time, his best Underboth, his best Tamale, the session that put his name in every camp conversation. The pain read as a manageable two-or-three; the damage, he now knows, was adrenaline-masked and much worse. His hindsight verdict is honest: it set his rehab back significantly, and it was worth it. Days two and three he spectated with his leg propped (missing the 3-on-2-on-1, which hurt him spiritually), managing the one variable most people miss: compressive load. He kept the leg near-straight all day, even under desks, because a bent knee loads the patellar tendon even at rest; standing up after sitting bent was his worst pain trigger.

The contest: format, pressure, and a phone call to mom

The 10’ contest ran 20-plus dunkers across two hoops (two dunks, three attempts each; top three per hoop to a finals where scores reset), WDA scoring, and the official FIBA balls: size-six women’s circumference at men’s weight, with strange grooves, issued new and nowhere near broken in. Half the field spent Tuesday and Wednesday dribbling them on concrete to make them cuffable. The stakes were singular: winner goes to FIBA 3×3 Edmonton in early August.

Ben’s strategy is the same adaptive system he described in his first episode, now refined: hold a preset A/B list and read the field: if competitors are making dunks, escalate (J Rich, then Tamale); if they’re missing, bank the safer make (Windmill, Reverse Pump). The mental load was the harder half: everyone had named him the favorite, he hates expectations, and the FIBA prize made every conversation about his game plan. His solution, which I love: he walked outside and called his mom, specifically because she knows nothing about dunking, just to hear a voice say “go do the thing, bro.”

His physical plan, stated to me with a straight face: stop if the pain exceeded eight out of ten. He knew it was clearing five almost guaranteed. Warmups were a cat-and-mouse Isaiah Rivera later told him he knows well: fine at one effort level, spiking with a tiny bit more, never predictable, peaking at a four.

The dunks: a punched Windmill, a 10-second J Rich, and an off-vert finish

Dunk one: going third with no field data, he hit the highest Windmill he could, punched first try, pain matching warmups. Optimism crept in. Dunk two: the field was making things (a thunderous double-up one-hander, cradles being mimed on the sideline), so the escalation tree said J Rich. His second attempt rattled out back-rim-front-rim-back-rim, an agonizing near-make that would have been one of his best ever. The third attempt is the one people will retell: he jumped, the pain arrived, and mid-air the undersized FIBA ball slipped off his fingertips during the transfer, visibly leaving his hand in the footage. What followed was the time-dilation every athlete knows from their scariest moment: a flight that “felt like thirty minutes,” a conscious mid-air scoop to get his fingers back on the ball, and the finish. He landed into a cluster of people who carried him to a chair.

The finals: scores reset, one more dunk required, and Ben’s body had nothing left at load. One-foot: no chance. A test two-foot baby penultimate: no chance. The remaining option was off-vert, and his best off-vert dunk is the 180 Windmill. The decision process happened while so zoned out talking through pain management with Kilganon that neither of them heard Jordan Southerland announce on the mic that Ben had 50 seconds to decide whether to jump; Hunter relayed it. Ben gave Kilganon a thumbs up, realized he was standing mid-court without a basketball (“guys, how do I do a dunk without a ball?”), caught a beautifully broken-in FIBA ball thrown from the crowd by Paco, stood under the rim, summoned the remembered feeling of the dunk, and punched the 180 Windmill off-vert first try. The celebratory run after landing degraded immediately into a hobble. He won by roughly 15 points (79 to second place’s 64), meaning, as he cheerfully admits, a plain cuff Windmill would have won it too. Off-vert dunks, for the record, score generously in the current WDA rubric, a quirk we expect to see revised.

The aftermath, and Ben’s leg-extension readiness system

The recovery news is good: per Kilganon’s counsel, acute tendon blow-ups without tears heal fast (it’s the repeated blow-ups that produce tears and long timelines), and Ben confirmed no tear: walking pain-free within days, slow squats fine, isos resumed. The airport, where he dragged a wheel-less 60-pound bag for miles producing a continuous scraping sound he refused to be embarrassed by, was the worst part of the week.

And he shared the most quietly brilliant self-monitoring system this podcast has aired: he calibrates jump readiness against his single-leg leg-extension tolerance, because the tendon forces are comparable. Around 30-80 pounds: off-vert jumps are safe. 90-120: two-foot jumps. His full 180-pound single-leg extension: one-foot jumping is back on the table. No guesswork, no vibes, a measurable gate for each tier of return. Steal that.

Ben’s August assignment: FIBA 3×3 Edmonton, where his stated goal is, quote, to kick Finn’s butt. His documentary-style breakdown of the contest is on his YouTube and linked in the description. Follow him everywhere as Ben Bounces. Next episode, the greatest dunker of all time returns with a shoe. Peace.

This is episode 57 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, a solo one, because something happened that deserved its own full telling: I got flown out for a dunk contest for the first time in my life. I’m Dylan Haugen, 5’11”, 17, and the TBL (The Basketball League, a 50-plus team professional league) flew me to Maryland for the Frederick Flying Cows’ All-Star Weekend dunk contest. I won it. That’s four contest wins in a row now. Here’s everything: how the invite happened, the preparation that almost fell apart, the contest itself, and the belt. There’s a belt.

How a 17-year-old gets flown to an All-Star Weekend

The quick contest resume for context: an outdoor 9’9” contest last June (fun, unstructured, my first event), the Nickel Dickle in Waconia, Minnesota in September (won it with a double-up X over three), and a February gym contest the day after my first Underboth (won that too). Then an email arrived from the Flying Cows’ social media manager: the TBL was running an online dunk contest, fan-voted via Google form, and the winner got flown to the All-Star Weekend contest in Frederick. I submitted a clip, campaigned shamelessly on Instagram, and about five days later got the phone call: I’d won the vote, and they were booking my flight and hotel. To everyone reading this who voted: this event existed for me because of you, and I mean that literally.

It wasn’t FIBA. It wasn’t Vegas. But flying out of state, hotel paid, to dunk at a professional league’s All-Star Weekend, that’s a different category of feeling than any local win, and it was one of the coolest moments of my career without a single dunk attached to it yet.

The preparation, which went sideways

Prep weekend was at the gym near my cabin (the Jack Link’s Activity Center, in the tiny town where Jack Link’s jerky was founded, the best empty gym in the middle of nowhere in America): rims at 9’10.75”, a touch low for event prep, but available. The session was diagnostic gold. Best Eastbay of my life, but on the fourth or fifth attempt, contest-unrealistic. And then I missed six consecutive double-up X’s, a dunk I literally could not remember last missing. Film review found it instantly: I was pushing forward on the ball instead of down-and-toward-me, sending my center of mass drifting so I was finishing mid-fall. Fixed it, made five straight. (The eternal lesson: film everything; the camera diagnoses what the body can’t feel.)

Then the week itself: sick the entire time. Deload Monday lift, skipped Tuesday upper entirely (lifting sick before an event is a risk with no upside), no Wednesday session, Thursday full rest, three consecutive rest days, which I never do. Flew to Washington D.C. Thursday and broke my own no-walking rule for the White House, the Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial, because you don’t skip the Lincoln Memorial to protect your calves. Some rules bend.

Contest night in Frederick

The event ran a 3-on-3 tournament and a three-point contest first, which meant sitting in the crowd from 7:00 until roughly 8:45, itching. The organizers, who were excellent throughout, gave me a weightlifting room and exactly the 30 minutes I needed: isos, dynamic warmup, sprint development, ball handling, caffeine. On-court warmups: a made cuff Windmill, a back-rimmed Hide-and-Seek that was nearly one of the craziest accidental makes ever (I threw the lob badly behind my shoulder, caught it anyway, and back-rimmed what would have been an outrageous dunk), and then a stretch of missing basic one-handers, because warmups love to lie to you in both directions.

One honest self-scout from the introductions: when they announced my name, I stood, waved like a substitute teacher, and sat back down. Showmanship is now officially on my development list alongside the 360 behind-the-back.

The dunks

• Round one, dunk one: double-up one-hander over Bobby Connors, a 6’3”-ish, extremely built Flying Cows player I recruited pre-contest specifically for his platform quality (Bobby, if you read this, I still can’t find your Instagram, DM me). Walked to the three-point line, didn’t think, went, punched it. Perfect execution. The “don’t think” cue, learned from a hundred Kilganon conversations about cueing, is real: for dunks you’ve done a thousand times, deliberation is the only failure mode. The crowd, for the only sub-six-foot guy in the field, was loud.
• Round one, dunk two: the between-the-legs off the lob, which took three attempts and unimpressive scores, but enough, combined with the opener, to reach the two-man final. The other dunker I’d most wanted in that final, a genuinely elite guy, top-rimmed a 180 between-the-legs twice and couldn’t land his behind-the-back, the cruelty of contests in one sentence.
• The final: my opponent attempted a catch from a bleacher-level throw and a Reverse Pump off a lob, missing both, which technically meant a layup wins it. I flew out here for more than a layup. There was a 6’9” player, one of the nicest humans I met all weekend, who I’d been eyeing all night, so I set up the double-up X over him. And then, mid-approach, my penultimate planted early and wrong, the single scariest feeling available when you’re mid-air over a 6’9” man in front of hundreds of people. Cleared him anyway. Dunked it anyway. Perfect score, win, and a reminder that the body sometimes saves the brain.

The belt, the cash, and the gratitude section

The prizes I didn’t know existed until I was there: a genuine championship belt (I own trophies and medals; a belt is different, a belt is forever) and $250 cash. Then photos with everyone, a broadcast interview for the TBL, and the overwhelming impression that every person involved, organizers, players, crowd, was hospitable beyond what the gig required. And my mom came with me and bought me dinner, which belongs in the credits of every win I ever get.

The reflection I’ll keep: at my home gyms, I do dunks I’ve never seen another human do in person, to total indifference, which is a strange ambient loneliness this sport carries (Tom says Australia’s the same). Events like this are the antidote: a building full of people who decided dunks matter for a night. That’s worth a flight. And every contest, this one included, exposes the same growth edges, dunk selection under pressure, showmanship, first-attempt conversion, that I’d rather learn at 17 in Frederick than at 22 somewhere bigger. The reps are the point. (The full contest is on my personal YouTube, linked in the description; a reaction breakdown with Hunter is coming.)

Four straight wins, one belt, and a standing goal for this platform: grow it until I can pay every dunker who comes on to tell their story, and get those stories onto Google where they outlive the algorithm. If you’re new, subscribe; if you voted, thank you again. Next episode is Adam’s journey from Taiwan through dunking, weightlifting, and growth. Peace out.

This is episode 52 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, and it’s the payoff episode: Andy Behle came on the show, said he’d bet on himself in the $1,000 Dunk Camp contest in Utah, and then won it two days later. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona, and Andy walked us through the full contest footage with insider commentary. The prize: $1,000 plus a free entry to Dunk Camp, so we’ll see him there. The bigger story might be the guy who finished second in scoring while barely dunking.

First, the vert contest: Isaiah Espinosa tested 50

Before the dunks, the event ran an official vertical test, and it produced a bombshell: Isaiah Espinosa, a 20-year-old volleyball player, tested a verified 50-inch vertical, measured before and after with consistent numbers, with what John Evans and Isaiah Rivera later described on their own podcast as roughly a one-second flight time, the highest they’ve ever seen on a 50-inch Vertec jump. Hyrum tested 48 on what was, by his standards, a bad day, and the 48 wasn’t even the headline.

Espinosa is the most fascinating figure in this whole video. He doesn’t train like a dunker (general overtime-athlete style work, coaches volleyball clients), hadn’t dunked in three or four weeks before the contest because of volleyball, and warm-ups consisted of casually tossing himself lobs with his head at the rim. He entered the dunk contest on a whim after winning the vert test, scored nearly 100 in the first round, and that score carried him into the finals despite missing everything in round two. Watching him attempt an Underboth with that bounce and no dunk-specific training, all three of us reached the same verdict: somebody needs to train this man like a dunker, because 52 inches is plausibly in there. THP, JumpX, somebody: steal the volleyball player.

The format, and our honest review of it

Round one: three mandated dunks for everyone (one-hander, Windmill, Reverse Pump), one attempt each, scored on the WDA system minus complexity (flight, style, finish). Round two: open dunks, full WDA scoring including complexity, two attempts, with rounds one and two averaging into the cut. Finals: top three.

The one-attempt round split the panel productively. The case for it: it rewards the consistency that every pro on this show preaches, and it forces real decisions about how much style to risk when a make is mandatory. The case against, which I feel strongly: anyone can miss one Windmill, and a format where Kilganon could exit in round one off a single hard-punched miss is measuring luck at the margins. Worse, it fights its own scoring: the rubric rewards flight, style, and finish while the single attempt incentivizes minimizing all three to guarantee the make. Our proposed fix is simple: two attempts, so round one can be both a consistency check and an actual display. It also structurally favors taller dunkers and off-dribble power guys, which Andy, a one-dribble Westbrook-style power finisher who was never good at lobs anyway, cheerfully acknowledged worked in his favor while correctly noting he also just didn’t miss.

The contest, beat by beat

• Andy’s strategy was psychological from the jump: drawing the first slot in round two, he flipped his plan and led with his hardest dunk, the 360 two-hand Pump, a dunk he’d hit for the first time only a week earlier in Houston, specifically to pressure everyone after him into reaching. It’s the Donovan opener doctrine executed by a guy who’s clearly been taking notes.
• The rim was a problem: roughly 9’10.5”-9’10.75” and stiff enough that Mason cut his wrist open and Andy left with lingering hand damage. Multiple guys jumped below their norm, and we’re all quietly hoping the camp rim situation improves by June.
• Mason Baker’s misses were diagnosable: he attempted a cuff 360 Reverse Windmill (respect for the risk) and later missed dunks that, on replay, failed for one identifiable reason: insufficient arm swing on his gather. He dribbles into dunks with almost no ball-swing momentum; with a technique change those become automatic. He also essentially spent a finals-tier dunk in round two, which is sequencing, not ability.
• The Hyrum handoff ruling: Hyrum jumped over his little cousin on a handoff, and the judges scored it as a jump-over without a push-off deduction. I dissent, on the record, consistent with myth number four: any held ball is a push-off, even a small one. Andy then demonstrated on camera how much boost a handoff gives him: forehead above the rim. Case closed.
• The carry-over quirk: Espinosa missing everything in round two and remaining in first place via his round-one average is the format’s strangest output, and the panel’s consensus was that round weighting needs another pass.

The final came down to Andy, Mason, and Espinosa, and Andy closed it out the way he promised on this very podcast: power basics, executed, while others reached and missed. The man called his shot, then hit it.

What this contest taught us

Three takeaways worth keeping. First, formats are strategy: Andy won partly by reading the structure (lead with your best when you go first; bank the guaranteed makes in a one-attempt round) the way contest winners always have. Second, the WDA scoring experiment continues to improve by iteration, and live contests like this are exactly the testing ground the growing-the-sport project needs; every flaw we found here is fixable in the next revision. Third, the talent pipeline keeps producing surprises from outside the community: a volleyball coach walked in, tested 50, and nearly stole a dunk contest on bounce alone. The sport is deeper than its Instagram.

Congratulations again to Andy: see you at camp, champ. He’s “andy.bay” on Instagram and his full contest video is linked in the description. Next episode is Finn Addy hitting his first Underboth. Comment with your verdict on the one-attempt format: genius or robbery?

This is episode 50 of the Dunk Talk Podcast, the milestone episode, and we spent it doing the thing this show was built for: watching the NBA dunk contest back with Donovan Hawkins and grading it with pro-dunker eyes. I’m Dylan Haugen, with Hunter Castona. The verdict up front, because it surprised people: we liked this contest. Best one in years. And Mac McClung deserved the win. The interesting parts are in the details the broadcast didn’t explain. (Watch this one on YouTube rather than audio; we react to the footage throughout.)

The field, dunk by dunk

Stephon Castle opened with a punched left-right 360 Windmill, basic by our standards but executed with real power, and the right kind of opener. His crown-jewel moment came later: a 360 reverse behind-the-back, first try, walked into casually, the best non-double-up dunk of the entire contest. (It also triggered a five-minute argument between me and Donovan about whether the reverse finish is harder than the standard one and whether Isaiah hits the lefty version in warmups. The debate remains unsettled and I remain correct.) His misses earlier weren’t the passer’s fault either, and we want this on the record: Chuck Millan threw four perfect lobs and got laughed at by NBA players for one bad one, when the footage clearly shows Castle’s timing missing, not Chuck’s placement.

Matas Buzelis was the flop I predicted out loud before the contest, and Donovan brought actual insider knowledge to explain why: in the entire week leading up, Buzelis had a total of maybe four or five max-effort jump sessions. You can see it in his attempts; the technique exists and the legs don’t. NBA players treating the contest as an afterthought is a recurring theme, and it shows in exactly this way.

Andre Jackson Jr. hurt the most because the talent was real: a 6’6” one-footer who could threaten a free-throw-line dunk, instead grinding through two-foot attempts that aren’t his game (a reverse 360 Windmill, a missed lob one-hander) and then bailing into something so safe it was barely a Windmill. Wrong bag, wrong plan.

Mac McClung ran the strategy Donovan literally described on this podcast months ago: open with your best. The car dunk to start was, in our shared opinion, the best car dunk in contest history, an honest 50 even with the toe grazing the hood, especially in a world that gave Blake Griffin a 50 for clearing a hood. The hoverboard Armageddon caught “it’s just a variation” criticism that we reject wholesale: a variation is a new dunk, the same way a two-hand Windmill isn’t disqualified because Windmills exist, and Donovan, who has done every double-up variation imaginable, testified that the Armageddon is genuinely hard. The Puma platform rim-tap finale was the one we’d have swapped (fine dunk, wrong slot; we both guessed he’d close with a Honey Dip variation), and the 180 two-hander was a 49 that got a 50. Every dunk: first try. That’s the part casuals undervalue and pros worship.

The 40-point floor is a scandal

The structural absurdity we can’t stop laughing about: NBA judges never score below 40, so Buzelis missed every attempt and received a 40. Translate the NBA’s 40-50 band onto an honest 0-10 scale and that’s an 8 for a miss. At one point the broadcast displayed that Mac needed a 38.9 to advance, a number that is literally impossible to score under the de facto floor; he could have airballed and moved on. It’s the same compressed-range disease we diagnosed in the scoring-system episodes, at the highest-budget contest on earth. Use the whole scale or the scores mean nothing.

The push-off awakening (conveniently timed)

The sociology of this contest fascinated us more than the dunks. For the first time, we watched non-dunkers, hundreds of them, in the replies of mainstream posts, correctly identifying Mac’s double-ups as push-offs. Knowledge we’ve been broadcasting for years finally went mainstream… at the precise moment the public wanted a reason to dock the three-time champion. Donovan’s read on the arc is right: Mac was the beloved underdog for two wins, and the same crowd that hyped him now wants him beaten, because audiences love an upset but resent a dynasty. Our position is the consistent one: double-ups are real, skilled, crowd-pleasing dunks that are systematically overscored, and that was true when everyone cheered them too. Mac’s one strategic error wasn’t doing double-ups; it was doing only double-ups. Swap the platform dunk for one off-dribble piece (a Scorpion variation, an Underboth attempt) and the criticism evaporates while the trophy stays.

The Mac McClung injustice

The episode ended on the conversation every dunker has: how is this man not in the NBA? G League MVP-level production averaging 30, three straight dunk contest wins generating the only All-Star Saturday buzz the league gets, elite movement and handle, and five career NBA games. The answer we got from a former D1 player friend is the cold one: a 6’2” guard without elite NBA passing or defense doesn’t fit the modern roster, full stop, and the counterexamples getting minutes have other things going on. Donovan’s summary stands: if Mac were 6’6” he’d simply be in the league. Instead he’s the best dunker the NBA has, employed by it only one Saturday a year.

Episode 50 in the books. Thank you all for getting this show to a number we genuinely didn’t plan for. Donovan is “donovanhawkins_37” on Instagram. Next episode is a big personal one: how I hit an Underboth at 5’11” and 17 years old. Comment with your scores for Mac’s four dunks, using the whole scale, cowards.

This is episode 26 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Jordan Southerland, the 1FootGod, the best one-foot dunker of all time. Jordan is 30, expecting his first daughter in October, and ten years into a pro career that includes the Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown, the Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest, a first-overseas win in Latvia over a motorcycle, and a 2022 summer where he went 22-1 with the single loss coming by one point to Isaiah Rivera. This is Part 1 of his story, from being named after Michael Jordan to becoming the one-foot standard everyone else is measured against.

Named after Michael Jordan, raised on the tapes

Jordan’s mom was a Bulls fan and named him after Michael Jordan (she wanted Jordan Michael; he ended up Jordan Marcus, which is its own irony since MJ’s son is Marcus Jordan). His early childhood was VHS tapes: the dunk contests, the championship runs, every Michael Jordan documentary that existed. The free-throw-line dunk is his first memory of wanting to dunk.

His dad could dunk at 5’10” and trained Jordan’s vertical from around age 8 with a system: lower the rim, set a height goal, raise it every month. Jordan was dunking on 9’ by age 9, then got stuck at that height for almost four years. His dad deliberately kept him off weights to avoid interfering with his growth. The breakthrough came at 13: a baseline one-foot two-hand dunk on 10’, in a game, at 5’6”, motivated by watching a shorter 12-year-old dunk before him. He hung on the rim and screamed. The very next play he slipped, twisted his ankle, and didn’t dunk again for a year.

He was also a legitimately good baseball player as a kid (all-star outfielder, two championships, robbed six home runs), playing it because Michael Jordan did. He quit around 11 or 12 after taking nine hit-by-pitches to the same unfortunate area in a ten-game span.

Cut from high school basketball three years in a row

Jordan never played a minute of high school basketball. He made second cuts every year. His junior year was the worst version: he led the second-cut team to a win over the starting five in the tryout scrimmage, his friends on varsity were lobbying for him, and the coach called him into his office and offered him team manager. The coach’s logic was that Jordan hadn’t played organized ball in two years, even though Jordan had been playing AAU in Chicago and Georgia and showed him footage.

His advice to young dunkers off the back of that story is blunt: don’t let coaches define your ceiling. Ask Isaiah. Ask Kilganon. Ask him. He made it further in basketball than anyone in his graduating class who actually made those teams.

Coach Friday and the track detour

The pivot came from his gym teacher, Coach Friday, a former NFL player with a heavy country accent who saw Jordan hit a baby windmill in gym class junior year and refused to let it go. Jordan went out for track. Junior year he wasn’t serious. Senior year he tried high jump for the first time and cleared 6 feet on his first attempt without knowing that wasn’t normal. The previous coach had never given him a shot at the event, again on a hunch.

Coach Friday passed away, and Jordan has his name tattooed on his leg. He credits him as the person who unlocked everything that followed, because high jump training rebuilt his body in a way basketball never did. Jordan had grown from 5’9” to 6’0” in under a year and the growth spurt left gaps in his knee cartilage that gave him shin splints and chronic knee pain through his entire adolescence. The stretching, landing mechanics, and different loading patterns from high jump are what let his knees finally catch up in his twenties.

Senior year was also the year of the first windmill and the first Eastbay. The Eastbay story is great: straight cuff, no dribble, full-speed half-court approach, forced over the front of the rim like an old Russell Westbrook dunk, ugliest Eastbay of his life, and one of the three or four most hyped moments he’s ever had on a court.

Rudy Clements, the church run, and ballet

Two unusual mentors shaped Jordan’s style. The first was Rudy Clements, a former Sprite contest dunker Jordan met at a church basketball run (you couldn’t play unless you attended the service). Rudy was 35 or 36, still dunking, and after watching Jordan match his two-hand Eastbay Reverse, he invited him to an outdoor session and bet Jordan would unlock five dunks. Jordan unlocked the Eastbay two-hands, behind-the-back, scoop, 360s, and the look-away windmill that became part of his signature. The flat, flared-leg, eyes-off-the-rim style people associate with the 1FootGod traces directly to Rudy.

The second was his college basketball coach, who made him take ballet to learn how to land. The ballet training is where his spinning control comes from, which eventually produced the one-foot 360 Windmill and the 540. The Shawn Kemp logo dunk idea grew out of the same period of asking what else his legs could do in the air.

The Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown: 10 years a pro

Jordan’s first pro contest was the Sprite Slam Dunk Showdown at the Indiana State Fair, August 14, 2014, at exactly 20 years old. He signed up through a website link, drove 8 hours, broke his phone on the trip, bought a new one with his hotel money, and slept in his car. The first dunker he saw when he walked in was Justin Darlington, one of his idols. The judge was Darryl Dawkins. Jordan took second; Darlington took third. He keeps the state fair ticket framed to this day, and this past August marked ten years as a professional dunker.

His second contest field was Worm, Young Hollywood, Reemix, and Guy Dupuy at New York All-Star Weekend. That was the era: every contest was five or six of the best dunkers alive, with no easy fields. Jordan thinks the FIBA circuit that Donovan Hawkins and Finn Addy are coming up through is the closest modern equivalent, and he’s glad it exists.

First win: Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest, 2016

Jordan’s first contest win came in 2016 at the Aaron Gordon Dunk Fest against a field that included Chris Staples, Michael Purdie, and Kenny Dobbs. Two months earlier he had lost City Slam (the ESPN contest, his first big call-up) on a behind-the-back out of the hand he couldn’t convert, a dunk that cost him several contests in a row. At Aaron Gordon he swapped it for an Underboth out of the hand and won the whole thing in front of Aaron Gordon. Two years from his first pro contest to beating everybody. That was the moment he knew he could be one of the best rather than just a professional.

The first overseas win was Latvia, and it’s his favorite adaptation story. Kristaps and Smoove took half his planned dunks in the early rounds (Kristaps opened with a Tamale, Smoove hit the Game Over Windmill and a scoop), so Jordan improvised the dunk he’d never made: behind-the-back out of the hand, over a person on a motorcycle. First make ever, in contest, for the win.

22-1: the 2022 summer and the Isaiah rivalry

Jordan’s 2022 summer was 22 or 23 contests with one loss. The loss was to Isaiah Rivera at Dunk Battle by a single point, and Jordan partially blames himself: he thought he’d made his first dunk (a scoop over Oliver Twist) when he’d actually missed, and he paced his remaining dunks on bad information. Since contests reopened in 2021, he counts four or five total losses out of roughly 100 contests.

He talks about Isaiah as his anime arch-rival, and the record backs it up: the two of them went back and forth across five contests in one summer with no one winning twice in a row. His theory is that every great dunker needs a nemesis. Kilganon had Lipek on the FIBA circuit. Guy Dupuy had T-Dub. The rivalries are what force the new dunks out.

The consistency doctrine

The most useful training segment of the episode is Jordan’s explanation of how he turned contest-winning into a repeatable system:

• Master your dunks before you collect new ones. When he started winning consistently, his sessions changed from new-dunk hunting to making Underboth five times in a row, J Rich two-hands five times in a row, behind-the-back five times in a row. The dunk has to be available on demand, not on a good day.
• Practice contest dunks while exhausted. He’d run a normal 30-40 minute session first, then practice his contest dunks dead tired. If it goes down with no legs, it goes down with adrenaline and a crowd.
• Donovan is the modern case study. Jordan points at Donovan’s year of quiet grinding as exactly the path: master the bag, then come back and win everything. There’s a Ballislife clip of Donovan hitting Underboth at 17. The version you see now is the same dunk repped into total ownership.

His one regret is the same one nearly every guest gives me: he didn’t low-rim through his early pro years. He low-rimmed as a kid to learn to dunk and then abandoned it until late in his career. The new-dunk ideas were always on paper, but the visualization reps weren’t there.

Christ Airs, the 540, and what’s next

At 30, Jordan is in a creative resurgence. Dom Gonzales randomly sent him a Christ Air dunk clip on a 9’ rim, and within two weeks Jordan had landed four Christ Air variations (left, right, Eastbay, and Christ Air Scorpion). The Christ Air is his favorite skateboarding trick from the Tony Hawk games, which is exactly the kind of cross-pollination that produces his dunks. His public goal list, on the record so nobody steals the credit: Christ Air Underboth, Christ Air double Honey Dip with a 360, the Christ Air Tamale circuit, and a fakie behind-the-back Christ Air Scorpion.

He also took a clear anti-props position. The China contest everyone watched was double-up after double-up, and the dunk that won it was Kilganon’s 540 with no props. Donovan just won Venice Ball with no props. Jordan jumps over cars in shows when asked, but in contests he wants the dunk itself to carry the score. It’s the same scoring conversation we had with Donovan in episode 25, from the guy who’s been living it for a decade.

Where to find Jordan

Jordan is “1FootGod” on Instagram and YouTube, and the YouTube channel has been heating up with full session uploads including the Christ Air series. Go subscribe. This was Part 1 of his story. Next episode is the Part 2 panel on how dunking can grow as a sport with CJ Champion, Billy Doran, Donovan Hawkins, and Justin Blanchard. Comment with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.

This is episode 17 of the Dunk Talk Podcast. I’m Dylan Haugen, joined by my co-host Hunter Castona, and the guest is Finn Addy, a 6’1” 21-year-old one-foot jumper from Ontario, Canada. Finn just won the 10’ contest at Dunk Camp 2024 and went straight from that contest to FIBA 3×3 in Edmonton, where he competed against Donovan Hawkins and Brandon Ruffin in front of an actual crowd. He’s also driving to Sudbury this Sunday to dunk at Jordan Kilganon’s house. The 12-month arc from “attended his first Dunk Camp as a fan” to “FIBA contest against Donovan Hawkins” is the cleanest case study of Dunk Camp being a real launching pad I’ve had on the show.

How Finn got into dunking

Finn started low-rim dunking around 12 or 13 the way most of us did, pretending to be Derrick Rose and LeBron James on a lowered hoop. He played soccer and hockey first, then switched to basketball in seventh grade. His first dunk landed at 16, around 5’10” and 120 pounds, on a 9’10” rim in his high school gym. The moment that pulled him into pro dunking specifically was finding Steven Selby on YouTube. Watching Selby’s arc from “normal 5’10” guy” to Eastbays motivated Finn to chase his own first dunk.

His high school dunk progression was slow and consistent: first dunk end of 10th grade, consistent basic dunks by 11th, no real growth in 12th. He played one year of college basketball (his “grade 13” year) and could win a 9’ contest by that point, but he wasn’t Eastbaying yet. College basketball season actually wrecked his vertical. By the end of the year he had “turned into a marathoner.” He couldn’t Eastbay anymore. He could barely Windmill.

A 39-inch vertical at Dunk Camp 2022 with zero training

Finn’s first Dunk Camp was 2022. He went as a fan because he didn’t know what to expect and was still playing basketball. He didn’t have an Instagram yet, didn’t know most of the dunk community, and just wanted to see the pros dunk in person. Then adrenaline did its thing and he landed his first Eastbay at camp. He tested 39 inches vertical the same week. He had done zero leg lifting in his life up to that point. The vertical was all from jumping, plus high-school basketball volume.

That number stayed roughly constant through his college basketball year (it went down during the season, then came back up after he quit). When he started leg lifting consistently five months before Dunk Camp 2024 (his first real strength block ever) the vertical climbed from a low-40 estimate to around 43. Three inches in five months on a complete training-noob with one-foot specialization. That’s the kind of beginner-gain curve that’s impossible if you started lifting at 12.

Finn’s one-foot specialization and influences

Finn is the closest thing on this podcast to a pure off-one dunker. He spent years where he could barely off-two grazes on a great day. He just hit his first off-two Eastbay this year. The one-foot influences he names in order: Steven Selby (got him into the sport), Jordan Southerland as the GOAT (“expanded the one-foot bag like crazy”), Ghee, Worm, Smooth. Hunter and I both deferred to Finn on the one-foot conversation because neither of us has Finn’s reps. He’s the one to ask if you want a one-foot dunker’s reading list.

His take on Southerland is the same one I keep coming back to: Southerland can do every dunk that left-two-feet do but off one. The high-jump dunk Southerland hit at the Thursday show with no warmup, in Easy Sliders, on like five minutes of standing around, is the kind of thing Finn has watched on tape over and over to figure out how Southerland makes it possible.

A hamstring strain four days before camp

Finn made it to Dunk Camp 2024 with a hamstring strain he gave himself wrestling his brother three or four days before flying. His brother had been drinking and challenged him to a wrestling match. Finn won, twice, and woke up the next morning with a tight hamstring. He spent the next few days icing and trying to recover.

In hindsight he says the timing might have been a blessing. He barely jumped Monday at camp because of the hamstring. He didn’t jump Tuesday or Wednesday because he wanted to be fresh for the Thursday 10’ contest. The forced rest meant he showed up to the contest as fresh as anyone in the field, hamstring and all.

Winning the 10’ contest

The contest day routine was about as simple as it gets. Finn got to the gym, put on his headphones, listened to “Untouchable” by NBA YoungBoy on repeat for three to four hours straight, and locked in. He didn’t come in with a written-down plan beforehand. The plan formed in the headphones.

His three round-one dunks (he hit all three first attempt):

• Dunk 1: 360 Windmill.
• Dunk 2: Elbow.
• Dunk 3: Reverse Psychology (the cradle / scoop hybrid most dunkers in the field hadn’t seen yet).

Round-one trifecta got him to the finals. He missed his last dunk of the finals but other competitors missed too, and the points stacked enough for him to win it. His finals dunks were a two-handed Reverse Windmill and a Lob Windmill, both first try. He genuinely wasn’t sure he should have won the contest based on the scoring, but the result stood and he advanced. (The 10’ contest winner gets the FIBA 3×3 Edmonton invite. That’s the next section.)

FIBA 3×3 Edmonton vs. Donovan Hawkins and Brandon Ruffin

Finn flew from Ontario to Edmonton (a four-hour flight, since Canada is a big country with a small population, and the distances between cities don’t reflect well on a map). FIBA covered his flight, hotel, and food. He had all day Friday to acclimate, the contest Saturday afternoon, and most of Sunday to hang out with the other competitors before flying home.

The other two competitors were Donovan Hawkins and Brandon Ruffin. He’d met Donovan briefly at Dunk Camp but didn’t really know either of them before the trip. By the end of Sunday they were close friends. He says it was the best weekend of his life by a wide margin.

The contest itself happened at halftime of an FIBA 3×3 game. Finn got 20–25 minutes of structured warmup time on the in-arena rim, plus a low rim to warm up on first. He says the warmup dunks felt like he was flying. (Unfortunately the broadcast didn’t use the warmup angle that captured them.) His three contest dunks went well on the first two but the third missed. He was honest about it: against Donovan, the only way he was winning was if Donovan missed. Donovan didn’t miss. The outcome was set.

Donovan, the impossible matchup

Hunter and I went back and forth with Finn on Donovan as a contest opponent. The consensus: Donovan might be the single hardest matchup in the world right now if the judging is straight. He has roughly five or six dunks he hits with five inches of space, on demand, every session. He hit the Gauntlet 20 minutes after a friend handed him the list. He’s done it casually enough that you can tell he could do it every single session if he felt like it.

The thing that makes him scarier: he never played organized basketball. He came up through hockey. He developed his entire dunking bag inside about three years from his first dunk at 15. Eastbay at 16. Underboth at 17. The full episode with Donovan covers the arc. Finn got to see it up close for a weekend in Edmonton. The takeaway he came home with is that Donovan’s ceiling is significantly above where any of us thought it was.

Going to Kilganon’s house

The other thing Finn took from Dunk Camp was a Sunday plan with Jordan Kilganon. After winning the 10’ contest at camp, Finn walked up to Kilganon and told him he’d make the drive to Sudbury if Kilganon wanted to dunk sometime. Kilganon DM’d him that night. They’ve been setting it up since.

The drive from where Finn is in Ontario to Sudbury is about five and a half to six hours. (He’ll be at Kilganon’s house this Sunday. He’s going to film as much of it as he can.)

This is the part of Finn’s story that I think most younger dunkers should pay attention to. Two years ago he showed up to Dunk Camp as a fan with no Instagram. This summer he’s competing at FIBA 3×3 against Donovan and dunking at Kilganon’s house. The whole arc came from showing up to camp, being friendly with the people in front of him, and saying yes to opportunities when they appeared. It really is that simple.

What’s next: THP, lifting, and dunks he can’t stop thinking about

Finn just joined THP two weeks before the recording. His self-taught lifting block (one day a week, mostly heavy quarter squats and some power work) got him 3 inches of vertical in five months. THP is going to be his first structured program. Initial numbers: 240 squat estimate (he hasn’t maxed full depth), 330 deadlift, 155 power clean. His pre-camp work was 405 quarter squats for sets of 6 explosive, which is enormous for a one-foot jumper of his weight (162 pounds).

The dunks he can’t stop thinking about heading into next year:

• 360 Inverter off lob, left-right. He’s closer than he expected to be.
• Underboth. His max touch is 11’4”, which makes an off-one Underboth almost stupid in context, but he’s the rare dunker with the hand speed to compensate.
• Off-two work overall. He’s building the bag from zero on two-foot and is making fast progress now that lifting has unlocked the vertical for it.

Where to find Finn

Finn posts under his own name on Instagram and is starting to put more content out as the FIBA-and-Kilganon arc unfolds. Hunter and I both pitched him on long-form YouTube content (using Minnesota Dunk Squad as the inspiration). His Kilganon house trip is going to be the right episode to start a YouTube channel with if he wants to.

Next episode is the live dunker Q&A I did with Hunter, open-ended questions from listeners, a lot of dunk-community insider stuff. After that the Dom Gonzales interview on becoming a pro at 5’8”. DunkMan League starts this summer. Comment with any dunker you want me and Hunter to interview next.