Magic Johnson Repeats Himself, Again

The NBA held it's annual Slam Dunk Contest this past Saturday night. You can check out some video of Dwight Howard and Gerald Green doing some pretty creative dunks here.

This was the 9th consecutive All-Star Saturday that the NBA has held a dunk contest. The event was a marquee event of the weekend from its (NBA) inception in 1984 through about 1994. I would say from 1995-1997, the event had become somewhat stale as the dunkers struggled to come up with much in the way of "new" dunks and the judges and fans reacted as if they were watching terrible dunkers doing terrible dunks, which wasn't true. They were watching dunkers do significantly better dunks than they were doing in 1987 (some of Jordan's dunks included), but their memories sucked. So the NBA scrapped the contest in 1998 and rolled out the most boring 15 minutes in TV history with a short lived game called "two-ball". The lockout left us All-Star weekendless in 1999, and then the dunk contest was brought back in 2000. That year, Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady and Steve Francis officially brought the dunk contest "back". It was an exciting contest that saw Carter break out numerous dunks that had never been seen in the NBA contest before.

In the 8 dunk contests since then, we've seen Jason Richardson, perhaps the best NBA dunk contest dunker ever, threw a ball off the backboard and put it through his legs. We've seen a 5'7" dunker do dunks that Spud Webb would have struggled to do with using a tennis ball. We've seen some great dunks. Some years were less remarkable (the Fred Jones year doesn't really stand out), but some have been really good, and some dunkers have done crazy stuff (Richardson, Carter, Robinson, Iguodala, etc.).

But the one constant, is that just about every year, Magic Johnson gets himself into one of his Elmer Fudd laughing fits and announces that the dunk contest "is back". "The dunk contest is back!". I bet there's been 5 contests since the dunk contest was in fact, back, that he's announced on TNT at least once (usually more) that "the slam dunk contest is back ahahhahahahahhaahhaahahaha!". Shut up, Magic Johnson.