Strength, skill and imagination. With a perfect cocktail of these three ingredients, Osceola Magic shooting guard Mac McClung managed to win the NBA Dunk Contest for the second year in a row. Only five other players have ever achieved a repeat of such a victory (including a certain Michael Jordan). Mac McClung's performance reaches another dimension because he doesn't even play in the NBA, but in the G League, something like the second league in which the affiliates participate. He won the trophy after a dunk with a perfect score (50 out of 50) in which he leapfrogged former player Shaquille O'Neal.
There was also a repeat winner in the three-point competition: Damian Lillard, with the Portland Trail Blazers in 2023 and now with the Milwaukee Bucks. But Stephen Curry's appearance in the duel with Sabrina Ionescu, the best shooter in the NBA, made it clear that he, who managed to hit 31 triples in a row in 2021, remains the king of distance shots. , but out of competition. The skills competition was won by a trio from the Indiana Pacers playing at home.
Mac McClung caused a sensation a year ago when he was a member of the NBA G League's Delaware Blue Coats and received an invitation to participate. Despite his discreet career as a basketball player, he excelled in high school and stood out for his dunks in college. At the age of 25, he didn't manage to break into the elite. He signed a 10-day contract with the Chicago Bulls, trained with the Lakers and the Warriors, but had to resign himself to playing outside the NBA. He surprised with his dunks and became the second white player to win a competition in which the power of African Americans almost always prevailed.
This year he was named the favorite and did not disappoint. Staging is highly valued in dunk contests and McClung has once again excelled in this regard. His final jump over O'Neal, in which he did a dunk with his back turned, gave him the victory in the final against Jaylen Brown. Previously, the Mexican Jaime Jáquez from the Miami Heats and Jacob Toppin from the New York Knicks were left out.
In the final, two dunks away, McClung finished the game with 98.8 points, one ahead of Boston Celtics All-Star Jaylen Brown. The winner jumped over two people for his first dunk and over Shaquille O'Neal for his second. Jáquez had already dunked on O'Neal, but while the Mexican did it from the front and with one hand, McClung's dunk was a two-handed dunk from his back.
For his part, in the three-point competition, Lillard became the eighth player to win the award twice and the first since Jason Kapono in 2007 and 2008 to do so in consecutive years, although he was on the verge of being eliminated from the finals came into play thanks to a tiebreaker. In the finale, Lillard posted a score of 26 points, ahead of Trae Young and Karl Anthony-Towns' 24. However, in the aforementioned non-competition charity challenge against Sabrina Ionescu, Stephen Curry scored 29 points, proving that this was even the case If he doesn't compete, he's still the true king of triples.
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