Dr. J is Wrong about Zach LaVine; When it Comes to Dunking, There is Only One Vince Carter
By Tully Corcoran
Dunkers are like Saturday Night Live casts; the best one ever is the one from when you were a teenager.
Which makes is so unsettling to see 66-year-old Julius “Dr. J” Irving, confirmed Baby Boomer and inventor of the free-throw-line dunk, spit up the sort of dunking blasphemy we see here, in this interview with Complex magazine.
"Who is the best dunker you have ever seen? JE: I’ll tell you; Zach has put on a show the last couple of years. He has to get kudos. I don’t know if the surprise factor and the timing coordination dunks that he does are as impactful as what Vince Carter brought to the scene when he did a few things that hadn’t been seen before. I think with Connie Hawkins, myself, Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, Clyde Drexler, there’s a lineage there, and I think Vince shook it up a little bit there with a couple of dunks there. I’m gonna let him reside in that spot right there."
Ok, yeah, Zach LaVine is a great dunker and no one disputes it. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear Dr. J stick with someone from his own era (perhaps even himself), but on technical merit alone, you’d have to say Levine is a better dunker than Dr. J or Michael Jordan.
But in a sports like dunking and figure skating, where artistic merit is a factor, there is only one choice forevermore: The most dazzling and beautiful and artistic dunk contest performance of all time was Vince Carter in 2000.
The 2000 dunk contest was over after Carter’s first dunk. Kenny Smith keeps going “let’s go home, let’s go home,” because after Carter’s first dunk, a 360 windmill, it was clear that the art of dunking had reached its zenith, and was no longer an endeavor worth pursuing. Just as people keep making two-seat sports cars even though the 1963 Corvette has already been created and people keep singing the national anthem even though Whitney Houston already sang it at the Super Bowl in 1991, many people have done the reverse 360 windmill since Carter did it in 2000. Some of them have even done it quite well. But nobody ever made it look that cool.
So that dunk contest could have been stopped right there, but fortunately it wasn’t, because Carter followed that with a windmill from behind the backboard, a between-the-legs dunk off a bounce from Tracy McGrady which gave him three of the top five dunks of all time. His first three dunks have been spinning, towering helicoptering things that made the crowd think he might just reach up and dunk the moon.
And then for Carter’s fourth dunk, he told a joke. He told a joke through the magic of interpretive dunk.
He just casually stuffed his entire arm in the rim.
Every dunk contestant since has tried to capture the essence of Carter’s violent ballet, and every contestant has come up just shy.
And by the way, the best SNL cast was also in 2000 so don’t try to tell me otherwise.