Justin Barber

Justin Barber introduced himself on Dunk Talk as a five foot ten former dunker, then paused on the word former. Before any of the rest of it, he was the original low rim guy. Back in 2006 and 2007 he was inventing dunks on lowered rims and putting them on YouTube, when a hundred thousand views was an enormous number. Dylan and Hunter Castona introduced him on Episode 27 as the person who opened up the lane that Dylan and Dom Gonzales work in now.

Today he sits on the technical committee of the World Dunk Association. He joined around June 2020, shortly after the WDA site launched during Covid, and he reached out to them because he could see the project heading toward the same problems with standardized scoring that his own research had already run into. The first WDA scored contests happened at Dunk Camp in 2022, and he has been part of every one since.

He is the reason so much of that episode has numbers in it. He has captured every individual judge score from the NBA dunk contest since 2000, up through about 2020, and the finding is not subtle: ten is the single most commonly awarded score. Not the middle of the scale, the top of it. The result is not a distribution at all, just tens and nines and eights, with the occasional six for a complete miss.

He also did the math on rim height for women, which is one of the few concrete answers anyone in the dunk community has produced on the question. Take the long jump, triple jump and high jump, compare male and female records, and the female mark lands around 85 percent of the male in all three, with sprinting close behind. Run those ratios against rim height and the answer keeps converging on roughly eight feet. His point is that eight foot rims are already everywhere, at parks and in driveways, so the accessible number and the fair number happen to be the same one. And the rim does not have to be ten feet just because basketball uses ten feet. Dunking is not basketball.

On format he wants an app: a dunker declares the dunk right before going, the system already knows its difficulty, and the judges score against a known target. On misses he borrows from gymnastics, where falling off the beam still earns credit for the routine attempted. A missed dunk should be worth something, just not so much that a miss scores a six while a make scores an eight. And on performance enhancing drugs his answer was the shortest one in the episode: adopt an existing organization’s rules verbatim. If there is precedent, use it.