NEW ORLEANS – Blake Griffin is not participating in the newly formatted dunk contest. He may not even be in the building for the premier event of All-Star Saturday night.
But that doesn’t mean the league’s most prolific dunker and 2011 dunk king doesn’t have an opinion on what might take place.
“It’s going to be a good one to me,” said Griffin, who has a league-high 735 dunks in the last three-plus seasons. “I like Terrence Ross. He’s got everything you kind of need for a dunk contest. But you can’t really go wrong with Paul George or John Wall or any of the guys really. But I like Terrence Ross. I like what he can do.”
Ross, who is the defending champion, joins a field of John Wall, Paul George, Damian Lillard, Ben McLemore and Harrison Barnes at Smoothie King Center on Saturday.
“It’s going to be interesting, to be honest,” said Raptors All-Star guard DeMar DeRozan, who participated in the 2011 contest against Griffin. “It seems like a dope concept so we’ll see how it turns out. It’s going to be exciting and I’m glad to be watching.”
The concept DeRozan is referring to has drawn its share of criticism and praise. It will consist of a team “freestyle” round in which the three dunkers from each conference will effectively have 90 seconds to complete at least one dunk each in a layup line format. Judges will choose a winner between the two conferences. That is followed by the “battle round” in which East and West dunkers will go head-to-head. The first conference to earn three battle round victories will be crowned champion. Online voting will then determine an individual champion or “dunker of the night.”
Griffin said he is a fan of the way past dunk contests were orchestrated, including the 2000 contest won by Vince Carter. He said that making things more complicated is not necessarily a good thing.
“The thing about the dunk contest and I’ve said this for a while, the problem is that everybody wants so much out of it and there are physical limits to what guys can do without bringing in other things, bringing in props, bringing in other guys, things like that,” Griffin said. “Sometimes it can get a little stale. And I think people’s expectations of what they’re about to see are a little bit out of reach. So, I think it needs to be a simple dunk contest.
“I just feel like the dunk contest from back in the day was pretty simple. I think they should go out there and let them dunk. It’s a little bit too robotic. There’s a lot of sitting. I think they should make it a little more free and let guys dunk and move on with it. I think they’d get better results from it.”
Griffin recalled the sitting around, waiting through various rounds and commercial breaks, being a problem for him when he competed. He won the 2011 crown by narrowly getting past DeRozan in the first round and completing an alley-oop over the hood of a silver Kia Optima in the grand finale.
Griffin’s performance set a standard for the past three contests that has been tough to match.
“He brought the showmanship to the dunk contest because before nobody would ever even think to do something like jumping over a car,” Ross said. “But, it was fun to watch.”
Still, Griffin said there were two dunks that year that he intended to do that were mimicked by other competitors in rounds before him.
“The problem when I did it I remember going out there and I had planned four dunks and two of the dunks I had planned on doing people did right before I did them,” Griffin said. “It kind of puts you out there with your back against the wall. You don’t know what you’re going to do and you have to make up something on the fly and that leads to not giving the crowd, I guess, what they want to see.”
Only five franchises have ever had more than one player win the Slam Dunk Contest since 1984 when it became a staple portion of All-Star Weekend and the premier even of All-Star Saturday. The Clippers, with Griffin and Brent Barry, and Raptors, with Ross and Carter, are the only two teams to have multiple winners in the last 25 years.
Would Griffin consider a return to the field eventually?
“I haven’t ruled out not ever being in the dunk contest again, but just right now I’d rather take the rest,” Griffin said coyly.
For now, though, his opinion of the event is good enough.