I have been pointing a camera at dunkers since 2007. Before Dunkademics I was producing for Ballislife, Hoopmixtape, Mars Reel and the Drew League, so the number of times I have stood under a rim waiting for somebody to do something insane is not a number I can count anymore. The question I get more than any other is which one of them was the most impressive.
Someone asked me again at The Dunk Camp in Salt Lake City this summer, on camera, with two dunkers standing next to me. I said it was hard, because it is. Then I answered it anyway, and I want to write out the full answer here, since the clip goes by fast.
T-Dub Is Still My Favorite of All Time
Here is exactly what I said on camera, before I had time to overthink it:
“My favorite of all time is probably T-Dub. Just his bounce and his style was so good.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Notice that I did not say the highest, or the strongest, or the guy with the biggest vertical. Bounce and style. Those two things are what separate a dunk that goes viral for a week from a dunk people still describe to each other ten years later. Bounce is what lets a dunker hold a shape in the air instead of surviving it. Style is what makes the shape yours.
A camera is honest about this in a way the human eye is not. In real time, a huge dunk and a beautiful dunk both look great. On the edit, in slow motion, the difference is obvious. T-Dub always held up in slow motion. That is the whole test.
Cam Hazzard Is the One Right Now
The second name out of my mouth was the one I did not have to think about at all:
“Recently, Cam, you’ve seen his stuff on my page.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Everyone in the dunk world has seen it, because it has been on my page most of this year. Cam Hazzard films at my gym in Los Angeles, and what he has done there in the last twelve months has changed what people think is possible for a human being of his size. Cam is crazy. That is the technical evaluation.
What makes him a good answer to this question is that he did not arrive fully formed. I have footage of Cam from years back. The current version is the result of a long stretch of showing up, filming, adjusting, and filming again. He is the clearest recent proof that the ceiling moves if you keep working at it in front of a camera.
Kao Is the Freakiest Athlete I Have Seen in Person
Kaodirichi Akobundu-Ehiogu is 6 foot 10. That alone is not the story, because plenty of tall guys dunk. The story is how far off the ground he gets while being that tall. Standing under the rim while it happens is a different experience than watching it on a phone, and it is the one time I have genuinely said oh my God out loud with the camera still rolling.
I am careful with the word freak, because it gets thrown at anyone with a 40 inch vertical. Kao earns it. Physics stops making sense at that height and that hang time. If you only get to see one dunker live in your life, and you want the version of this sport that looks impossible, that is the one.
Donovan Hawkins Is a Dunking Machine
“Donovan’s a beast. He’s just like a dunking machine. He’s so big, so strong. His hand speed is so good, his technique.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
Hand speed is the thing casual fans never look at. Almost every hard freestyle dunk is decided in the fraction of a second between the ball leaving one hand and arriving where it needs to be. Donovan does that faster than almost anyone, at a size where he should not be able to. Big, strong, fast hands, clean technique. There is no hole in it.
Donovan is also a reminder of what a single clip can do. A Tyler Currie video is what pulled him into this sport in the first place. Somebody watched footage, decided they wanted in, and became one of the best in the world at it. That is why I keep filming.
The 18-Year-Old From Poland
The reason this conversation happened at all is that Piotr Zawiślak was standing next to me at camp, and I had just watched him dunk for the first time.
“He’s crazy. He’s young in the game and he’s already black band. That’s, it’s insane.”
Billy Doran, Dunkademics
He told me dunking in front of my camera used to be in his dream, which is a sentence I have heard versions of before, but rarely from someone who then goes out and backs it up the way he did. He is eighteen and he already holds the highest band. Guys twice his age are still chasing it.
When Dylan asked what Piotr has to do to become the number one dunker in the world, I gave the only honest answer I had. He needs a few inches of vertical, because everything else is already in place. The hand speed is there, the technique is there. If he had been a little higher on the exact dunks I watched him do that day, he would already be in the conversation with everybody else. He wrote about the trip from his side in dunking in front of my camera.
What This List Actually Has in Common
Read the words back. Bounce. Style. Hand speed. Technique. Four of the five names on my list are described by control, not by altitude. Only Kao is on there for pure athletic freakiness, and even his case is about how absurd the ratio is between his height and his hang time.
Nobody starting out believes this. Everybody thinks the answer is vertical, so they train vertical and nothing else, then wonder why their footage does not look like the footage they grew up watching. The vertical gets you to the rim. Balance and hands and style are what make anyone remember the clip afterward.
Cataloguing this is the whole point of what we are building here. Dunker-Pedia exists so that every dunker in this sport has a real page with their real numbers and the clips that surfaced them, instead of their career living inside somebody else’s algorithm. Dylan Haugen of Dunk Talk laid out the full list and what it signals for the sport, and Dunker Spotlight made the argument that this footage counts as a credential.
That interview happened because Dylan and Dennis Yu ran a session for the campers on how athletes get found online, then offered to film anybody who wanted it. Their write-up of the method is the repurposing system from Dunk Camp, the version for athletes in any sport is when the authority films you, and the marketing version is coverage from the category authority.
Ask me this question again in five years and one of these names will probably have changed. That is a good thing. Every list I have ever made has been proven wrong by somebody who was 18 when I made it.