You might have heard a whole bunch of screams floating in on the breeze yesterday afternoon. And if you did (whilst everyone is fine) you should know that the noise was coming from the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, where an entire arena’s worth of people witnessed two NBA players committing several consecutive straight-up murders.
Aaron Gordon and Zach LaVine engaged in one of the all-time great NBA Slam Dunk Contests of all time yesterday, during the festivities of the NBA’s All-Star Weekend.
Earlier in the day, Klay Thompson managed to wrestle the 3-Point Shootout crown from fellow Splash Brother Steph Curry in a gripping encounter that had commentators calling for it to replace the usually tepid Dunk Contest as the weekend’s main event feature.
Gordon and LaVine then proceeded to blow shit completely out of the water.
Trading perfect 50 attempts in a dunk-for-dunk shootout that boggled the mind, the 20-year-old Gordon of the Orlando Magic threw down some of the most memorable jams in the contest’s history, which the also-20-year-old LaVine of the Minnesota Timberwolves somehow managed to match.
Gordon started off with this between-the-legs reverse effort that, in retrospect, was really only a warm-up.
LaVine, the contest’s defending champion, then stepped up and set the tone.
And whilst the initial thought may have been that, from that point, it was simply going to be LaVine’s day in a cakewalk, Gordon brought in the Magic‘s mascot and started lighting things up.
To which LaVine responded by bringing the goddamned free throw line into play.
And from that point on, it went from great, to absolutely BONKERS.
Gordon put a literal new spin on a Mailman classic.
LaVine matched it with an almost identical effort.
How on earth do you top that? By throwing down one of the best dunks ever seen in an NBA Slam Dunk contest.
This is some legit video game shit.
Which LaVine casually stepped a few seconds later and matched. Because these two men are not human and this was the greatest display of dunking we’ve ever seen.
And with the two trading perfect 50s back-and-forth, they had to pull out literally everything they had in reserve.
Gordon, 50.
LaVine, 50.
In fact, it took the judges upping their own standards and (arguably) judging Gordon pretty harshly on this unreal double-pump effort to grab some separation between the two…
…which LaVine took advantage of; putting the exclamation mark on things with this mind-bending between-the-legs dunk from the freaking free-throw line.
Zach LaVine became the sixth multiple Slam Dunk Contest winner, following in the footsteps of the likes of Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, Jason Richardson, Harold Miner, and the only man to win the contest on three occasions, Nate Robinson.
If you think you’re losing your mind just watching the video of these ridiculous efforts, imagine what the people inside the arena were doing.
Going apeshit. They were all going absolutely apeshit.
That showdown between @ZachLaVine and @Double0AG had us like….. #NBAAllStarTOhttps://t.co/6oruNstREO
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) February 14, 2016
The NBA isn’t kidding when it says it’s where amazing happens. God DAMN.
Source: NBA/YouTube.
Photo: Vaughn Ridley/Getty.
