For years now we have seen less amusement from the NBA Dunk Contest, but in 2024 it was at an all-time low. Heading into the dunk contest this season, we knew it was going to be painful. The Contest has been lackluster for years due to no star players entering the field. The 2024 field was not much better: Mac McClung (G-League), Jacob Toppin (G-League), Jaylen Brown and The dunks throughout the night got progressively worse.

Let’s give credit where it’s due. Jaylen Brown deserves some credit for being the first star player to enter the dunk contest in a while. Hopefully, Brown joining the field will motivate more star players. I don’t know how true it is, but Chuck Millan said that they’ve tried to get stars and rising players in the Dunk Contest. If that’s the case and star players would start joining again, it would bring back the validation and hype around the event.

But in the 2024 NBA Dunk Contest we saw no originality. Most of the dunks were vague and repetitive. The Dunks performed by Brown were underwhelming. One of the dunks performed by Jaylen Brown was him jumping over Kai Cenat sitting down on a chair. How is that interesting? Mac McClung and Jacob Toppin, two G-Leaguers at least kept it interesting.

That performance by Brown is not going to help us draw in more star players. It’s going to be remembered for how the judges viewed it. It was undeserving of the score that it received. In the 2024 event, we essentially saw the same dunk performed by two different competitors. Both Jaime Jacquez Jr. and Mac McClung jumped over Shaquille O’Neal.

Another factor as to why this Dunk Contest was a bust was that the judges were penalizing missed dunks. Which is not supposed to be the case. The biggest reason as to why this year’s event might have been so bad is that there’s nothing left to do. There are no original ideas anymore. The Dunk contest either needs to be saved and the only people that can do that are the stars in the league or it simply needs to be replaced with a more entertaining event. But this year was not it.

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