During the first part of the 2020-21 NBA season, it was popular to take cracks at Blake Griffin. More specifically, it was pretty much open season on Griffin’s lack of in-game dunking.
Griffin, once revered as one of the best athletes in the league and one of its most accomplished dunkers, went a year and a half between in-game dunks. Between Dec. 2019 and March 2021, Griffin didn’t throw one down, and plenty of people were eager to point that out.
Griffin admitted that the narrative bothered him, in part because he didn’t have the chance to dunk while he wasn’t even playing.
“It bothered me a little bit. Because the stat was, ‘He hasn’t dunked in 400-something days.’ Sure,” Griffin said on JJ Redick’s “The Old Man & the Three” podcast. “I had surgery in January. I played my last game for the Pistons before the pandemic hit December 28, 2019. And then we didn’t go to the bubble. So I didn’t play again until December 24, 2020. Everybody’s like, ‘He hasn’t dunked in over a year.’ I’m like, ‘I haven’t played in over a year.’ Yeah, I played those 19 games with the Pistons and didn’t dunk.
“But that just pissed me off because you guys know the stat, you’re just choosing to be like, ‘Let’s do days instead of games.’ Because games is still like, ‘Oh, he hasn’t dunked in 19 games.’ ‘Or… Hear me out… We can just do just straight days!'”
Griffin’s manager had a somewhat similar explanation to why he wasn’t dunking with Detroit. Once Griffin got to Brooklyn, he proved pretty quickly that he may not be in his prime anymore, but he can still throw it down when he gets the chance. The jokes started to fade pretty quickly after that.
