NBA All Star Week-End: Slam Dunk Contest

It's that time of year again. The week-end all the guys send their girlfriends, wives and mistresses to spa's and gear up on beer in front of the television: NBA All Star Week-end. But what is there to see, is it worth watching and more importantly, does anybody even care?

The All Star Week-end used to be something everybody looked forward to. It never was as big as Super Bowl week-end, but still. How often do you get all the big names from all the conferences on the same floor, battling it out in what seemed to be the perfect mix between a real game and a Harlem Globetrotter's exhibition. As so many other sports, basketball had to give in to commerce, and so now we have the T-Mobile Rookie Challenge, Playstation Skills Challenge, Haier Shooting Stars, Footlocker 3-Point Shootout and finally the Sprite Slam Dunk contest. What used to be a fun-packed week-end slowly but surely changed to a boring, never-ending event where the only thing worth waiting for was the actual all star game on Sunday.

Until tonight. One man singlehandedly succeeded in reviving the whole week-end, and made the Slam Dunk contest as exciting as in MJ's days. And that man is Dwight Howard. What he showed today was unbelievable, and if I hadn't seen it I would even say impossible. After Iverson, way back in the beginning of this millennium, he was the only player to score maximum points on all 4 dunks, leaving the crowd and his fellow NBA-players absolutely speechless Only down-side is that there was never a contest. Gerald Green, the defending champion, might still have had some hope after the first round, but that's when Howard got the real big guns out.

His first dunk was absolutely amazing: taking of from behind the board, bouncing the ball on the backside of the board, jumping in court and still managing to dunk it home. Now this might not sound as spectacular, but just try and not hit your head on the board and still manage to maintain enough height to bring it home. I feel that Green didn't get enough merit for his first dunk: he placed a birthday cake on the backside of the rim, lit the candle, and blew it out before slamming the leather through the hoop. Maybe the judges didn't believe that he actually blew the candle, but it wouldn't have mattered.

It was always going to be a contest between Green and Howard, but after dunk number 2, the game was over, and the crowd, as well as the players, knew it. Howard took off his jersey to expose the classic Superman shirt and was handed the according cape by his teammate. His second dunk defied both gravity and all dunk-skills ever shown. Taking off from the free-throw line, he jumped so high that he actually had to smash the ball through the hoop rather than dunking it. Another perfect score and game over.

Green got through to the finals as well, as expected, but all he could do was hope that Howard would miss his 2 final dunks. Which he didn't. Instead, he presented an even more impressive dunk, passing the ball to himself against the board with his left-hand before slamming it with his right. All Green came up with was a variation of the 'between the legs'-dunk, nice, but nowhere near Howard's performance.

The last dunk wasn't that exciting, after all what we had witnessed before that is, and it was just the matter of waiting 5 minutes for the 'official' votes to come in to tell us what everybody already knew: Howard is the 2008 Slam Dunk Contest winner, with 78% of the voters behind him.

Before that, Jason Kapono had already saved the day by winning back-to-back the 3 Point Shootout competition with an incredible 25 points, equalizing the more than 20 year old record set by Mark Price in 1986.

So who knew, maybe the competition isn't dead after all. It's gonna take some amazing skills to top some of the performances we saw tonight, and the bar was definitely raised again. With the likes of Howard and Green, one can only hope they'll find new ways to move the crowd and come up with some crazy creative dunks.