Dmytro “Smoove” Kryvenko

Dmytro Kryvenko, known everywhere as Smoove Ukraine, is one of the greatest dunkers of all time and one of the sport’s true originals. He grew up in a small town in Ukraine in a sports family: his father played basketball and was a professional chess player, and his older brother played professional volleyball. His brother is eight years older and was already dunking when Dmytro was small, so while other kids saw Kobe Bryant on television, he was watching windmills happen in front of him in real life.

Ukraine had no basketball on TV beyond a single weekly NBA highlights program, so his early exposure came from 25-minute recaps and a top ten countdown. He started playing at six, tried swimming, taekwondo, chess and volleyball, and kept coming back to basketball. The rims at his home court were 9’10” and 9’8″, and he got his first dunk on a full 10 foot rim in a PE class at 14, no dribble, just a straight jump. Within a year he was hitting windmills and double pumps.

He came up as a street ball player rather than through an organized system, then walked onto a university team that doubled as a professional club and was drafted into Ukraine’s second division with no organized experience at all. Between 16 and 18 he won roughly 20 dunk contests in Ukraine. He is also a basketball freestyler, and reaching the superfinal of Ukraine’s Got Talent with his trick routine is what convinced him at 19 that dunking and tricks could be a living.

His signature is the Game Over: a behind-the-back pass caught between the legs, which he landed in a Ukrainian contest final in 2009 on his ninth attempt and named for the fact that nobody could answer it. His hardest dunk is the Kamikaze, a one-handed variation he adapted from a freestyle move at the Dunk Elite camp in Morocco in 2015, working it up from a 7 foot rim and finally landing it on 10 feet in 2016 after three days of trying. Both Jordan Kilganon and Isaiah Rivera have since done versions of it.

He took second at the London Midnight Madness contest in 2012 after Team Flight Brothers posted his mixtape, which led to the agency that founded Dunk Elite in 2013. He was one of its first members alongside Justin Darlington, Porter Maberry and Christoph Dargas, with Kilganon joining in 2015. He won a FIBA World Cup gold medal in the Ukrainian uniform in 2016, which he describes as one of the best experiences of his life because of what it meant to people back home.

Multiple knee surgeries have changed how he trains, and he now dunks about once a week and lifts twice, protecting the knees he wants to still have at 40. He signed with the Harlem Globetrotters in 2019 after a viral behind-the-back pass at FIBA in Japan, though covid cut the season short. The war in Ukraine forced him to leave home, and he now lives in Texas and tours with the Harlem Wizards.

His dunking is documented on Dunkademics, and he told the whole story on Dunk Talk in the episode on one of the greatest dunkers of all time.