Dmytro Kryvenko, known everywhere as Smoove, is a 6'2" Ukrainian dunker who has been competing since his teens. He is a one-foot dunker off a left plant, and his catalogue of invented dunks is as long as anyone's in the sport.
He grew up in a small Ukrainian town in a sporting family. His father played basketball and was a professional chess player, his older brother played professional volleyball, and the two of them played together on the local team. His brother is eight years older and was already dunking, so where most kids of that era discovered the idea through Kobe Bryant on television, Dmytro watched windmills happen in front of him in person. Television barely factored into it anyway: Ukrainian TV carried almost no basketball beyond a single weekly NBA highlights show.
He started playing at six and cycled through swimming, taekwondo, chess and volleyball before settling. The rims at his home court sat at 9'10" and 9'8", so his first dunk on a genuine ten foot rim did not come until he was fourteen, in a PE class, off a straight jump with no dribble. Within a year he had windmills and double pumps.
He came up through street ball rather than any organized system, then walked onto a university team that doubled as a professional club and was drafted into Ukraine's second division having never played organized basketball. Between sixteen and eighteen he won roughly twenty dunk contests in Ukraine. He is also a basketball freestyler, and reaching the superfinal of Ukraine's Got Talent with a trick routine at nineteen is what convinced him this could be a living.
His signature is the Game Over, a behind-the-back pass caught between the legs, which he landed in a Ukrainian contest final in 2009 on his ninth attempt and named for the fact that nobody in the building had an answer for it. The one he rates hardest is the Kamikaze, a one-handed variation he adapted from a freestyle move at the Dunk Elite camp in Morocco in 2015. He built it up from a seven foot rim and finally put it down on ten feet in 2016 after three days of trying. Both Jordan Kilganon and Isaiah Rivera have since landed versions of it.
A second place at London Midnight Madness in 2012, after Team Flight Brothers posted his mixtape, led him to the agency that founded Dunk Elite in 2013, where he was among the first members alongside Justin Darlington and Porter Maberry. He won a FIBA World Cup gold medal in the Ukrainian uniform in 2016. Multiple knee surgeries have since changed how he works, and he now dunks about once a week and lifts twice, protecting the knees he wants to still have at forty. He signed with the Harlem Globetrotters in 2019 after a behind-the-back pass at FIBA in Japan went viral, though covid cut that season short, and the war in Ukraine later forced him out of the country. He now lives in Texas and tours with the Harlem Wizards.