The NBA is making a fairly significant change to the Slam Dunk Contest for the upcoming All-Star Weekend.
The league announced Friday that fan voting will return to the Dunk Contest this year, albeit on a limited basis. Anyone who has registered for a free NBA ID will be able to submit a score for each dunk during the event. The average of these scores will count as one of the five official scores, paired with the standard group of four official judges.
The NBA had previously employed fan voting to determine the winner of the Slam Dunk Contest from 2008 to 2014, but eliminated that format over a decade ago and placed the contest back in the hands of the four official judges. That has not been without controversy, particularly in 2020, when some strange scoring seemingly screwed up the outcome. Fan involvement may or may not have been beneficial in that instance, but the league clearly wants to restore some fan involvement to an event that has struggled to garner the interest that it used to.
There has not been a lot of excitement for this year’s Dunk Contest since the field was announced. The league has more work to do to reverse that, but giving the fans a modest say in the outcome might be a start.
