One of my duties as the world’s preeminent YouTube highlights superstar (a title bestowed on me by… me, but only because I was tired of waiting for someone else to do so) is to look at every single dunk that occurs is an NBA game in order to ponder its possible inclusion in my dunks of the month videos. Not just some of the dunks. Not just the dunks I already know to be pretty cool. All the dunks. In the course of my duties I see a lot of really lame dunks.
One thing I have noticed while performing this task is that Jabari Parker is really slamming the heck out of the ball right now. Especially recently. I made highlight vids for some of the games where he had a lot of jams, but even in the games where I didn’t, the games where he was scoring fewer points, he was STILL jamming. And slamming. Ramming? Yes. It makes more sense than ever to have Parker fill the role of the recently departed John Collins. You don’t get the same lob-catching ability, but does it really matter if the dunk gets dunked from the sky or dunked from the ground? It’s still a dunk, it’s still two points (until Parker activates the cheat code to dunk from the three-point line).
It’s becoming clear that lots of defenders just can’t stop Parker from scoring. If he wants to score, he’s going to go in there and score. This is a similar concept to what Parker said about defense, something to the effect of “you can’t always stop the people in this league from scoring, they’re too good”. He got clowned for that statement, but it came from the realization that no one could stop HIM, so there must be other players like HIM who are similarly unable to be stopped.
Did that make sense? I’m not rereading it to check.