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.
Originally published .