Thursday night, TNT’s Inside The NBA crew revealed the six participants in the 2013 Sprite Slam Dunk Contest. The list includes Eric Bledsoe, Kenneth Faried, Terrence Ross…blah, blah, blah…nobody cares. Why? Because the only people that matter are James “Flight” White and Gerald Green, who will finally face each other in a dunk contest on American soil (see above video). Green is a two-time participant (he won in 2007) who fizzled out of the league for a few seasons before resurfacing with the Nets last year — here’s his welcome back party, in case you forgot.
His counterpart White is a different story though. The former McDonald’s All-American and Cincinnati Bearcat is an Internet legend, known for eye-popping high school and college dunk contest performances — many of which required visiting sites of ill repute to view (thankfully, we have YouTube now). He’d played a grand total of 148 NBA minutes before performing his own reappearing act with the Knicks this season, and lucky for us, he’s played just enough minutes in order to qualify.
People are split on the contest these days (Nate Robinson is a three-time winner — we understand), but this is the best-case scenario that could breathe life into an ailing format. Not LeBron James, not Vince Carter’s corpse, not hologram Dominique Wilkins. And we’re not saying it’ll be 2000 all over again, but it can’t be any worse than the aforementioned Robinson bricking 956 dunks in a row in 2006.
