The 2024 All-Star weekend has started with much pomp and glamor, with the Slam Dunk and the Three-Point contests concluding last night’s action. G-League star and the 2023 champion of the contest, Mac McClung, once again emerged as the winner of the Dunk contest. However, many people have started undermining the competition’s relevance seeing the growing indifference surrounding it, with some even calling to replace the contest with a new skills challenge for the subsequent All-Star weekends.
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Among the people calling for the dismissal of the contest from the next editions of the All-Star festivities, is the former Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce. However, Pierce came up with a rather strange analogy to drive his point across, comparing the contest to an ex-girlfriend. Pierce tried highlighting the lackluster performances plaguing the competition for the past few years through his analogy.
Expressing his thoughts on X, Pierce wrote,
“The Dunk contest is like that Xgirl friend u keep going back to , thinking u can regain that spark u once had , at some point u just gotta let her go move on to something else.”
The Dunk contest is like that Xgirl friend u keep going back to , thinking u can regain that spark u once had , at some point u just gotta let her go move on to something else ♂️
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) February 18, 2024
Through this analogy, Pierce also highlights how several fans are waiting for the spark, i.e., some highlight-worthy impressive dunking performances that catch the eyes of every onlooker alike. Over the past few years, there have been only a few such performances, with the All-Star Dunk contest slowly losing the charm that it once had.
Pierce believes that it’s high time the league moves on from this competition. Fans have demanded that the dunk contest be replaced with something new that would interest them. Perhaps, the league could try introducing competitions such as 1v1s between players, which has been long in demand by the NBA fraternity as part of the All-Star festivities.
NBA veterans believe that the Dunk Contest has lost its charm
Many other NBA veterans agree with Paul Pierce about how the Slam Dunk Contest has lost its charm over the years. There has been a steady decline in the popularity of the dunk contest over the years, which justifies the truth in Pierce’s statements. For example, the Big Aristotle Shaquille O’Neal was left unimpressed after the 2022 Dunk Contest, which many NBA fans also dub as the ‘worst dunk contest’ in the history of the league.
Besides Shaq, Warriors forward Draymond Green has also questioned the authenticity of the Dunk Contest in today’s era in his podcast. Green compared the competition nowadays with those from the time of Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins, who were famous for dominating the contest with their powerful and rim-shattering dunks.
Green calls for the league to bring some creativity to the competition that would induce the same charm and excitement of the 80s and the 90s. Instead of bringing in G-League players, the Warriors star requested the NBA to increase the prize money of the contest to generate more enthusiasm between NBA stars.
