NBA All-Star Saturday Night honored its self-imposed curfew and ended before 8 p.m. Eastern, allowing viewers in certain markets to catch the end of “Wheel of Fortune.”
Fittingly, the conclusion of the Slam Dunk Contest that capped the festivities in Inglewood, Calif., recalled a would-be “Before & After” puzzle: VINCE CARTER BRYANT.
There stood Vince Carter, TV analyst and first dunk champ of the millennium, offering encouragement to San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant. Bryant needed a 47.5 on his second dunk of the final round to eclipse Miami’s Keshad Johnson after delivering a perfect 50 with his first.
A competition that introduced its greenhorn participants with fictitious action movie trailers had at last attained drama worthy of Tinseltown.
Instead, it limped to an anticlimactic finale as fans settled for lackluster over blockbuster again.
Johnson and Bryant defeated Jaxson Hayes of the Los Angeles Lakers and Orlando Magic rookie Jase Richardson to reach the finals. Each took part in the contest for the first time.
Along the way, Richardson fell on his back and appeared to bump his head after an ill-timed attempt on a 360 lob. He emerged uninjured.
As actor, comedian and noted roundball lover Michael Rapaport took to X to suggest the NBA “cancel this shit before someone gets hurt,” the men dunked on. Someone needed to win, and indeed, people wanted to, if only because it beat the alternative.
“Just losing in general, no matter what it is. I could care less if it was an Uno game, I could care less if it was running lines, I could care less if it’s a shooting competition,” Bryant said. “I feel like losing is something that burns. I just hate it. That’s just something you don’t want to feel.”
The same social media platforms that lazily lambasted the field for being relative unknowns featured footage of Bryant executing the very dunk he was aiming for: bouncing the ball off the glass and finishing with a thunderous reverse.
“I’ve been doing that dunk since I was 14 years old,” said Bryant, a 20-year-old from Riverside, Calif. “Just the ball didn’t roll my way tonight.”
Bryant settled for a different dunk to produce a score knowing it wouldn’t top the ever-smiling and dancing Johnson, who took the court alongside rapper E-40 and skied over him for his initial first-round dunk.
Johnson surely did his part to uphold the hype in a contest that has given fans only four participants in each of the past five All-Star weekends. As ever, the judges’ table housed dunking royalty representing an era when players’ attitudes toward the contest and game were different.
Kudos, then, to Carter. While he might have lingered around Bryant for a few seconds too long as Saturday afternoon approached evening out Cali way, he admirably threw support instead of shade. That produced what the peppy Johnson called “contagious” energy.
“I feel like he loved being out here. He loved giving back,” Johnson said. “Him being able to embrace me, embrace the other participants. You know when something is real, and I feel like his love, his knowledge he was trying to get to us and him being accessible to us, it was real love, and I felt that.”
Now for coaxing contemporary dunkers approaching Carter’s profile into the contest, too.
Whether dunks take flight outside LA or elsewhere, it shouldn’t take incentives to give fans a good show, but here we are.
Someone should grab the wheel, or else the “Wheel” could look even more attractive next year.
