Travis Reynolds and I, Dylan Haugen, were most of the way through reviewing every dunk from Shaq’s DunkMan League group stages when we went off on a tangent about Dan Gross. It was supposed to be a thirty second intermission. It turned into the part of the conversation I have thought about most since.
The reason it came up is that Travis is building something for him, and the reason he is building it is that right now there is nowhere to actually watch Dan Gross dunk.
One of the best dunkers alive, and almost no way to see it
If you want to watch Dan, your options are to scroll his Instagram one post at a time hunting for dunks, or to dig through Travis’s raw session videos on YouTube and find the clips where he happens to be in frame. That is it. There is no mix, no highlight reel, no single place you can send somebody.
Travis put it plainly: if prime Dan were in the DunkMan League, he would put his money on him. The league is built exactly for what Dan does. And yet a real chunk of the people watching dunking right now do not know who he is, which is a strange thing to be true about someone Travis calls one of the greatest dunkers on the planet.
He is not saying that loosely. Dan is a two-foot, left-right jumper whose signature is the 360 Inverter, and he has a Dunkademics dunker profile like most of the pros do. He just does not have a body of work anybody can find.
The timeline
Dan had serious bounce in high school. He was already doing 360s and Double Elbows before he had trained for any of it. He was playing college basketball into 2020 and quit later that year to focus on dunking full time.
2021 was his real prime. That was the first year he could put everything into it, and it is the year he went off. 2022 started with a few good sessions and then essentially disappeared, because he had to take most of the year off with a back injury. He came back for a second prime in 2023 and hit some genuinely insane things, including a 360 Scoop Elbow.
After that it slid. 2024 was a slow decline even though he was still landing dunks most people never will. By 2025 he would try and it just was not the same, and at that point it stopped being a training problem.
What is actually wrong with his knees
Travis explained it better than I could, so here it is as close to how he said it as I can get.
One knee had a piece of bone that had broken off and was floating around inside the joint. When you extend your leg all the way and bring it back in, the kneecap shifts slightly into its groove, and the loose bone would get caught in there. It would lock up on him while he was just walking around. You obviously do not want that happening in the middle of a dunk. It had been building for a long time.
The other knee had a very small separation of bone. Not a break exactly, but bone, and bone hurts. So it was both knees, and the reason it never resolved is that bone injuries do not warm up the way soft tissue does. Once it starts hurting mid-session, it is not going to loosen up ten minutes later. It just ends the day. Zach Velis went through something similar and spent close to two years being told it was tendonitis before anyone found the loose bone.
He had double knee surgery earlier this year.
Where he is right now
As of August, Dan is technically cleared to start doing things again, and he is taking it unbelievably slowly, which is the correct call. There is no version of rushing this that ends well.
The photo at the top of this article is from a session in North Carolina this year with Dan, Ben Hopkins, Travis and a few of the other guys. Travis had a session with him in July where Dan bounced the ball off the ground, off the backboard, caught it and elbowed it. For about five minutes it looked like nothing had happened to him at all. Then he had to stop.
Travis’s read on that was the part that stuck with me: what looked incredible to everybody standing there was nothing compared to what Dan used to do. He used to hit that same dunk with a Double Elbow, comfortably. When I was with him about a month before that, he put down one small dunk without really using his knees at all. It was all hips.
Both of us think he comes back. The condition is narrow but simple. If he can jump and the injuries stop causing pain, he is fine. That is genuinely the whole question.
What Travis is building
Travis is working with Dan to collect literally every dunk he has footage of. Two things come out of that.
The first is a long raw video where you can just sit and watch every dunk he has done, however long that ends up being. Nobody knows yet, because the footage is still being gathered.
The second is an all-time mix, Hoop Mixtape style. That is the one that matters, because a raw archive is for people who already care and a mix is what makes somebody care in the first place.
There is no release date on either. Travis has been going back and forth on putting the raw video out after the mix so the mix gets the attention it deserves, which I think is right. He also floated putting the raw one up unlisted for anyone who really wants it before then.
Why any of this is worth doing
This is the exact problem the podcast exists for. There are dunkers who are elite at what they do and almost invisible everywhere it counts. Years of work sitting as loose clips on a phone, nothing written down, nothing anybody can search. When that person stops dunking for two years, the record just quietly stops existing.
Dan is the clearest case of it I can point to. One of the best to ever do this, out with a real injury, with no highlight reel to his name and a generation of dunkers coming up who have never seen him at his best. That is fixable, and Travis is fixing it.
When the mix drops we will cover it. Until then, if you have not seen Dan dunk, go find the clips, and pay attention to what he is doing off two feet.
Originally published .