I’m Travis Reynolds, a professional dunker from North Carolina. On episode 68 of the Dunk Talk Podcast we broke down the 2026 NBA Dunk Contest, plus the new dunks Mac McClung dropped on Instagram that same weekend. The full episode is at the top of this page, and the show’s write-up is on the Dunk Talk episode article. Here’s how the weekend looked from a dunker’s seat.
The contest had a scoring problem
The thing that jumps out to anyone who actually dunks is what I call the forty-point-floor problem. Judges almost never score a contest dunk below the low forties, so the whole scale gets compressed and a clean, hard dunk ends up a point or two off a botched one. Add in the choreography, guys burning half the shot clock on a dance before they even jump, and you get a show that rewards the wrong things. I’d rather watch one first-try monster than three theatrical misses.
Mac McClung stole the weekend from his phone
Here’s the part that says everything about where dunking is right now: Mac McClung didn’t even compete, and he still won the weekend. He posted a handful of dunks to Instagram while the actual contest was airing, and any one of them was better than the whole event. One was an inverted scorpion, a couple were the kind of flexibility-heavy motions most pros can’t get near, and he threw the Eastbay reverse off the dribble that’s been his signature since high school. When the best dunk of dunk-contest weekend shows up on someone’s story instead of the broadcast, that tells you something.
What the pros are actually watching for
When dunkers watch a contest, we’re not scoring the height, we’re scoring the craft: did the ball control hold up, was the finish clean, did he make a hard pattern look easy. That’s the same lens Jordan Kilganon changed the game with, and it’s why the guys grinding trick dunks online often out-dunk the guys on the NBA stage. The contest is a great window into the sport, but the real state of dunking lives in the sessions people post the other fifty-one weeks of the year.
The takeaway
The 2026 contest was fun and flawed in all the usual ways, and the real headline was a guy dunking into his phone camera. If you want to see where the level actually is, watch the dunkers, not just the once-a-year stage. That’s most of what we do on Dunk Talk.