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.