Mac McClung: Savior of the Dunk Contest?

Jacob Nevis Sports Editor

Mac McClung was considered a nobody by the everyday NBA fan. McClung, a guard for the NBA G-league team, the Delaware Blue Coats, was asked to become the first G-league player to ever participate in the NBA Slam Dunk Contest.

An undrafted rookie out of Texas Tech, McClung never received an opportunity to show the NBA world what he could do — until the night of the dunk contest. In recent years, the competition has been quite unmemorable; it has started to lose its hype due to the way it’s been conducted. The last memorable dunk contest was in 2015 when Zach LaVine won. The NBA allows the contestants two chances to dunk in each of the contest’s two rounds. So when a player misses the first dunk in a round, the spectacle of the second dunk is taken away. This year, however, McClung not only made all of his dunks but also received perfect 10s for some. McClung almost received a perfect 50 for each dunk, receiving a 49 just once. Consequently, McClung might just be the savior that the dunk contest needed. Having an unknown player perform as well as he did brought the beauty back into basketball. Instead of the normal superstars winning the dunk contest, fans got to witness the true skill of someone whom they had never seen play before.

The dunk contest also allowed McClung to become an overnight sensation. On the night of the contest, he racked up around 50k followers on Instagram. The day after the dunk contest, his following shot all the way up to 1 million.

Because of the wonder that McClung displayed, I believe the NBA should start to do this more often for all of the All-Star events. When viewers are able to observe the talent of players they might never get to see otherwise, it allows the athletes to become much more visible. It also allows viewers to get the best experience from the events, because it truly shows the viewers the best players in the respective categories, instead of just showing the well-known superstars to help raise ratings.

McClung might be the hero the NBA didn’t know it needed for its All-Star events.