Shaquille O’Neal has turned his criticism of recent NBA slam-dunk contests into a new business. The Hall of Famer has launched the Dunkman league, and its first championship is set for Aug. 25 with eight finalists chasing a $500,000 prize.
The title round will be shown live on TNT and HBO Max, putting the competition in front of a far bigger audience than the typical dunk contest that O’Neal has dismissed as usually terrible. Mac McClung enters as the No. 1 seed, giving the finals a clear headliner as the league moves from a novelty into something built to look and feel like a professional event.
That is the point. O’Neal created Dunkman after watching recent NBA dunk contests and deciding the best dunkers were not being treated like pros. He said the sport’s top dunkers used to come from the NBA, but now younger specialists are often better in the air, so he wanted to bring them together in a setting that pays them and judges them like a real competition. All of the dunkers are compensated for taking part.
The league began with 24 dunkers and moved through four group stages at Overtime Elite in Atlanta over four weeks. Each group winner advanced, and the remaining four finalists were selected as wild cards based on the next four highest scores. Five judges scored made and missed dunks using set criteria, with dunkers allowed two attempts in 60 seconds, a format built to reward execution as much as creativity.
That structure also explains why the championship matters beyond one night. Vince Carter, who won the 2000 All-Star Weekend contest, is on the commentary team, and he has said what he has seen with Dunkman has expanded people’s thinking about what dunking can be. Chris Andersen’s 2005 struggle, when he missed 13 of his 15 attempts, still hangs over any discussion of how brutal dunk contests can be when the format is wrong.
O’Neal’s own history with the event gives the league extra edge. He was never in the NBA dunk contest during his nearly 20-year NBA career, yet he has been one of the loudest voices judging what has gone wrong with it, even as he helps build a parallel stage for dunkers who made their names in international competitions found across the internet. The first championship on Aug. 25 will be the real test: whether Dunkman can turn outrage at old dunk contests into a format people want to watch again.
