Slam Dunk contestants honor past with array of old dunks

The four players in the Sprite Slam Dunk Championship paid a fitting tribute to past legends on Saturday by using old dunks that men like Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins and Julius Erving had invented several decades ago.

Though DeMar DeRozan, Serge Ibaka and Jevale McGee each tried their best to imitate dunks we have all seen many times before, it was Blake Griffin’s dunk over the front bumper of a small sedan — a tribute to the long history of dunking over props — that stole the show as the most original of the recycled dunks.

“I wanted to turn back the clock all the way to 2009 with that one,” Griffin said of his tribute dunk to Nate Robinson, who dunked over the 6’10″ Dwight Howard to win the 2009 Slam Dunk Championship. “But hurdling a 6’10″ tall man is kinda hard so I changed it to the front of a small car. That way I could say I dunked over a car, even though it was just the front of a small one.”

This year marked the 11th straight year that players have honored past legends of the dunk contest by recycling old dunks.

Is Andre Iguodala just too talented to play for the Sixers?

Ever since Allen Iverson left in a trade to Denver in 2006, the Sixers have widely been regarded as ‘Andre Iguodala’s team,’ and with that team’s performance over the past few years, it’s no wonder that the Illinois native has taken heat as an underachiever.

But, is that fair?

It seems too easy to say that, after seven years, Iguodala just isn’t the superstar player we originally thought he could be and that the Sixers would be better off without him.

The issue no one seems to want to address is that Iguodala could very well be one of the most talented players in NBA history, whose elite-level basketball skills are being misused and wasted in Philadelphia.

At 6’6″, Iguodala is the same height as one Michael Jeffrey Jordan, who was, by my estimate, the greatest basketball player ever. Fortunately for Jordan, he didn’t have to spend one minute of his career playing for the Sixers, so his career path wasn’t choked and beaten before it even began as was the case with Iguodala.

According to many projections, Iguodala could average as many as 90 points per game with 70 rebounds, 45 assists, 30 steals and 40 earth-shattering dunks if he played with any other team in the league. Other, more conservative estimates have him averaging only 70 points per game, but you get the picture.

It may be time to end the Iguodala experiment and allow his talent to flow freely with another NBA team, like the Timberwolves or maybe the Warriors. It is not too late for the Sixers to right the ship and become a respectable franchise and for Iguodala to smash record after record on the way to making some other team trillions upon trillions of dollars by employing the future greatest player in NBA history.

It has become painfully obvious that Iguodala will not work in Philadelphia, but the world deserves to see the forward’s true talent, and if that means having to trade him to another team that will automatically become the greatest team in NBA history for years to come, then so be it.