How to Save the Dunk Contest in Two Easy Steps (and the D-Leauge can help)

Another Dunk Contest is in the books and while there were some pretty sweet dunks the overall sentiment seems to be the format sucked--and it did. Not to take anything away from John Wall, but he and Paul George should have been facing off in the Finals (there should have been a Finals) for dunk-tastic glory.

If the NBA wants to fix it they can in just two steps, and they only need to look to the D-League for inspiration.

From Bleacher Report

Step one is easy--scrap the current format completely. It sucks, I do kind of dig the team dunk the East did but otherwise it was a massive fail. No, the format needs to be completely scrapped, but that is so the second step can be carried out.

Step two--make it all about the dunks again. Maybe it is because there are no new dunks anymore, but the whole focus of the event seems to be to put on a show minus the dunks. It's almost like the emphasis has been about adding pageantry to the event.

Cut it out NBA.

The league needs to make it all about dunking and nothing else. How can they do it? Open the event up to any and all that want in. During the season there were other guys that wanted in (I can remember Victor Oladipo saying he wanted in). There are lots of solid dunkers in the league so why not give them a shot?

Now if you let anyone in and go through a round-robin elimination process it is going to take forever. Instead of that treat it like an American Idol audition. Interested players will get one dunk in front of the judges who will vote to have him move on or not.

The judges will keep the next field down to like 4-8 guys who will than go in to a round robin format.

To make this work the crap will have to go. No more robes and royal proclamations, and I'd say jumping over people needs to be outlawed--those dunks are boring.

So how can the D-League help? Check out this clip of the D-Leagues winner, Tony Mitchell. The man was creative, but his dunks were still about creating awesome slams (and did not involve jumping over cars with a choir in the back ground).



It is possible to make the Dunk Contest awesome again. The NBA and the players just need to want to.

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