If you thought Vince Carter was old last season, you won’t BELIEVE what he’s been up to during the offseason. Instead of spending that valuable off-time getting younger, like any ancient NBA player should be doing, he’s getting older! I guess he figures that since this is, by his own admission, his last year in the NBA, he can undergo the normal aging process like everyone else. And that’s fine. He’s the Hall-Of-Famer here, he gets to do what he wants.
I do wish that he’d want to dunk it more, though. He had 15 slammers last season, which was a really nice total for a guy who was way on the wrong side of 40. This year? Zero. Not a single jam has been blammed by the one they used to endearingly call “Air Canada”. We’re already a quarter of the way through the regular season (which is nuts, I swear it just started a week or two ago), so if he wants to have his final dunkilation be more than a black video that’s 1 second long, he needs to get going.
If dunking it means him getting a boost from Damian Jones, so be it. Jones dunks it so easily that he could easily help lift Carter to the requisite height for dunkage to happen. The NBA rules specifically forbid such acts to aid in the scoring process, but they could easily make it look like an accident. Like, Jones is on his hands and knees scrabbling around for a supposed missing contact while playing is going on, and just at that moment Carter goes in for a layup right as Jones raises back up again, pushing Carter even higher for him to slam it through the rim. The refs would have to keep their whistles silent on something like that.