Jaylen Brown was quite the controversial figure during the NBA Dunk Contest. Here we had the biggest name in years delivering some of the worst dunks in years. The sheer blandness of Brown’s attempts was quite perplexing.
The crowd is booing Jaylen Brown.
— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) February 18, 2024
Among Brown’s many lowlights was him covering his eyes after dunking the ball, in some sort of disastrous replication of former Celtic Dee Brown’s famous dunk.
To make matters worse, Brown consistently received some of the best scores of the night from the judges. As a result, he became one of the last two dunkers standing along with Mac McClung.
It wasn’t long before speculation spread online that the NBA wanted the biggest star in this year’s contest to win it.
This dunk contest is rigged. We’re storming Secaucus in the morning.
— Jason Gallagher (@jga41agher) February 18, 2024
Not only is the dunk contest bad
It’s also rigged
Just bring in the YouTube dunkers already
— Andrew Schlecht (@AndrewKSchlecht) February 18, 2024
But if the NBA really was trying to rig the contest, Brown was making their task impossible.
McClung finished up with an impressive slam over Shaq — despite struggling to live up to his performance from last year — while Brown closed with yet another very standard dunk, except this time he wore a glove and dunked left-handed.
Brown was even booed by the crowd on multiple occasions, as fans realised they’d paid a sickening amount of money to watch an absolute disasterclass of a dunk contest. Even the most aggressive rig job wouldn’t have been able swing this thing in his favour.
Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t the first time there had been talk of the dunk contest being rigged.
In the months following Blake Griffin’s win in 2011, a memo leaked that seemed to confirm the league had pencilled Griffin in as the winner before the event had even started.
But at least Blake still put on a show, as opposed to whatever on earth we just saw from Jaylen Brown.
Lord help the dunk contest.
READ MORE: Jaylen Brown Praises Derrick White Amid All-Star Snub