Jordan Kilganon

Jordan Kilganon is widely regarded as the greatest dunker of all time. He grew up in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, was named after Michael Jordan, and there is footage of him dunking at one year old because his dad kept a hoop low enough for him to reach. He played everything as a kid, mostly basketball and volleyball, though javelin was the one track event he was actually good at. Jumping is the thing that stuck.

Around 14 he realized professional dunking was a real career, watching guys like Air Up There and Justin Darlington, and that changed everything. He started dunking on low rims three and four hours a day, met Pat Kingsley, a dunker from his own city who pulled him into the online scene, and got his first regulation dunk at 16. He had nearly stopped shooting threes by the end of high school because he was too busy dunking, and when his last high school basketball game ended he dropped every other sport for dunking.

What sets him apart is invention. He has catalogued more than 270 dunks on a dedicated Instagram account, most of them combinations, but the genuinely new shapes are his own: the Lost and Found, the Hide and Seek, and the spin-first blind catch that carries his name, each found by moving a ball around his body until something looked like a dunk. The Scorpion became the dunk the world knows him for, though he is quick to say the idea was not originally his and that he only made it work on a 10-foot rim. The 720 convinced him it was real: Hoop Mixtape flew him to Los Angeles to try it, he had never attempted one, and he destroyed it first try.

At NBA All-Star Weekend the league hid him among a group of trampoline performers and revealed him as a professional when he threw down a Scorpion in jeans. His Gary Payton lost-and-found video is still the most viewed video the NBA has ever posted on any platform, and it is also why his hair is blue: he was growing it out for dreads, dyed it blue first, and the video went out before the dreads did. He is the most followed professional dunker in the world, has won Kings of Air twice, and has built a career on social media, sponsorships and events from Ghetto Games in Latvia to shows across China.

In 2026 he became the first professional dunker with his own signature shoe. He had spent three and a half years in product design school filling sketchbooks that were ninety percent shoes before dropping out to dunk, then thousands of his own dollars testing brands until he settled on Serious Player Only. The Game 1 Low came back in his cyan blue, carrying the Scorpion as his logo, the word ACT from his first tattoo, and the number 12, which is there because he has not touched 12 feet yet. The day he does, he has a 50 inch vertical.

He also runs the Jump Master programs and, with Tom Barnes of JumpX, the custom Jump Master X tier. His advice for getting into the sport is simple: reach out and make friends. He points to Travis Reynolds, who commented “first comment” on his videos for years until the two were friends. His dunking is documented on Dunkademics, and he has been on Dunk Talk twice, first with Dylan Haugen and Hunter Castona for how he became the greatest dunker of all time, and later for the shoe.