Dunk score. These are the things the nba is spending time on.

[Kblaze8855]

Player Vertical: Based on the mid-hip height when the player’s jumping foot leaves the ground versus their peak mid-hip height during the jump.

Takeoff Distance: The distance from the hoop at the point of takeoff. If the player jumps from one foot, it’s measured from the jumping foot’s big toe. If the player jumps from two feet, it’s measured from the midpoint between the big toes.

Hang Time: How long the dunker is airborne.
Maximum Ball Height: The peak height of the center of the ball during the dunk.

Reach Back Distance: The furthest distance between the player’s head and the ball as it is pulled back from the hoop.

Ball Speed Through the Rim: How fast the ball is moving as it passes through the rim.

Total Ball Acceleration: The total acceleration of the ball toward the hoop, accounting for the force the player applies during the dunk.

Ball Movement: The distance the ball travels over the course of the dunk, minus the takeoff distance. This captures many flashy motions often performed during dunks: Windmill, Double Clutch, Behind the back, etc.

Not all features are continuous — some are boolean (true or false) features that focus on specific stylistic elements, including:
Reverse Dunk
360 Dunk
Through the Legs
Alley-oop and Self-Oop: The score is adjusted based on the length of the pass, where the ball is caught, and whether the player catches the ball with one or two hands.

Tip Dunk: Scaled higher based on how aggressively the player contests for the rebound versus simply being in the right place for an easy tip-in.



and there’s more

[Kblaze8855]

More:



The Impact of DefenseDefensive factors are treated as unweighted bonus points beyond the base score. This way, the lack of a defender doesn’t penalize a dunk, but great defense can elevate its difficulty and the overall score. Multiple defenders’ contributions are additive, but each defender’s influence diminishes with every additional body in the mix. Key defensive features include:


Defensive Contest Level: A combined measure of (1) how close the defender’s body is to the dunker and how directly they are positioned between the dunker and the hoop, and (2) how close the defender’s hand is to the ball, with slight weighting towards the ball-hand-rim angle. If the defender is under or beyond the hoop, they are penalized.


Alignment Score: Measures how directly the dunker and defender are facing each other, using dot products of their direction vectors and scaled by distance. A chest-to-chest contest would result in a perfect 1.0 alignment score.


Collision Score: Measures the intensity of contact between the dunker and the defender. It evaluates the sum of their velocity components toward each other, scaled inversely by the distance between them. Two players in very close proximity moving directly at each other at high speeds would have a high collision score.


The model also detects situations where a defender attempts to take a charge or when the dunker jumps over the defender. In these cases, special logic is used to focus on 2D body-based features rather than hand-based features.

Overall Scoring DistributionsBelow is a histogram representing the overall distribution of the Dunk Score for all dunks from the 2023-24 NBA season. Most dunks land somewhere in the 20-50 range. It’s a right-skewed distribution, meaning only a select few make it into the upper echelon.

[Kblaze8855]

After all that Explaining you can go down the list of plays with the highest dunk score so far.

https://www.nba.com/stats/players/dunk-scores



A John Collins poster on Coby White is the highest scored of the year.

[Real Men Wear Green]

Collins has a 9 inch height advantage. No one thought to consider size?

[BarberSchool]

Should we be surprised, that ideas THIS MF LAME are what gets sewn together, when a bunch of bean-counting pindick alien f@ggots like Silver and his crew, are sitting around a table, trying in vain, to imagine new and inventive ways to engage fans more, fans that are completely different in every mental and physical way than alien f@ggots like silver ?

They keep trying to change sh!t, constantly, because their previous corny gimmicks got stale mad fast, not stopping to think, that maybe less input from them was what the fkn game always needed ? Go back to how shit was before you fkn jerkoff little “never played ball at any significantly competitive level, but have a masters in marketing” out of touch, out of place f@ggot MF’s ever tried to “put your marks” on a product that was previously superior to any version of it you ****ed with ?????

[warriorfan]

We are already at a point of analytic fatigue to an extent. This is just way over the top :lol

We need at least a couple of the aspects of the game to have some mystery and subjectiveness. Trying to dissect dope dunks like this takes the soul away from the game.

[Neal Romer]

We are already at a point of analytic fatigue to an extent. This is just way over the top :lol

We need at least a couple of the aspects of the game to have some mystery and subjectiveness. Trying to dissect dope dunks like this takes the soul away from the game.


It will never happen but I actually think it would be interesting if the league stopped publishing stats of any kind for stretches. Players dont get to see their stats during games, fans dont get to see them. Nobody knows whose numbers look like what. The league could keep track privately and publish guys' averages every few weeks or something, but no daily box scores etc.

That way people would actually have to watch games to keep tabs on their favorite players. No more perusing box scores to stay informed. If you dont watch the games youre not gonna be able to make any arguments about anything. The discussions would be centered a lot more around the execution than just stat comparisons.

Again I know theres a below-zero chance of it happening, but I think itd be cool.

[StrongLurk]

It will never happen but I actually think it would be interesting if the league stopped publishing stats of any kind for stretches. Players dont get to see their stats during games, fans dont get to see them. Nobody knows whose numbers look like what. The league could keep track privately and publish guys' averages every few weeks or something, but no daily box scores etc.

That way people would actually have to watch games to keep tabs on their favorite players. No more perusing box scores to stay informed. If you dont watch the games youre not gonna be able to make any arguments about anything. The discussions would be centered a lot more around the execution than just stat comparisons.

Again I know theres a below-zero chance of it happening, but I think itd be cool.

I agree. I would love zero social media information too on games (so no sports on instagram/X). So much of sports is "viewed" and discussed through the lens of the worse social media formats and it completely distorted sports discourse. Legal gambling pretty much killed sports discourse too. It's now solely about the money and low-brow drama.

[ILLsmak]

I think it’s something that, if you took a panel of fans, would produce consistent results with this ranking system. Not 1:1 but pretty close.

It’s so weird to try to objectively measure what we see and how impressive it was when our eyes and brains can process so much more than a bunch of numbers. This seems to be something thar will be used in online debates. Uh actually ur number 2 dunk is not top 5 due to dunk score criteria.

-Smak

[ILLsmak]

Double post but just saw that dunk. Pretty impressive due to the fact he took off and went thru him before dunking. It was good.

P funny they call dude john the baptist. How many years he’s been in the league and I never heard that.


-Smak