Demystifying Dunk Score
Let's break down everything that goes into the new dunk score statistic!
“Lebron turned a corner, INSIDEEEEE! He made Jusuf Nurkic a screensaver!!” For years, dunking has been the cause of huge exclamation for fans and players alike, causing uproar in any arena regardless of the color of the home team’s jersey. Fans often discuss the best dunk of the year and teammates even hold in-season contests to decide who is the better dunker. Thus, starting in the 2024-2025 NBA season, the NBA decided to introduce a brand-new statistic entitled Dunk Score to put an end to the never-ending discourse on who owns the title of “Dunk of the Year”.
Dunk Score quantifies how good a dunk is through 25+ tracked characteristics, which combine to create a Dunk Score and 3 sub-statistics: Jump, Style, and Defensive Contest. Jump captures how long and high the player jumped on their dunk, Style gives a score for the creativity of the dunk, and Defensive Contest quantifies the amount of rim protection offered by the defense during the dunk.
However, even with all the new statistics and tracking the NBA has introduced with Dunk Score there is still a lot we don’t know. There is no way to see who the best dunker in the NBA is based on Dunk Score, which team in the NBA is best at dunking, or even what players are the most fearless when attacking the rim. Thus through some clever data manipulation and some cool graphs, we hope to answer all those questions and more! One small note, we want to preface before we dive in: the data of all the analysis below is updated as of 12/22/2024, so some dunks/dunkers may have been omitted from our takeaways.
The Dunk King
Let’s start off our superlatives with easily the most discussed question when it comes to dunks: Who is the best dunker?
To ensure that sample size wasn’t an issue, we set the qualifying number of dunks to be at least 10. Although it was a close race between Brandon Miller and Jalen Green, the NBA’s undisputed Dunk King this far into the season is…
…Jalen Green, with an average score of 67.72!
This disgusting poster on Cade Cunningham is Jalen’s best dunk of the season, netting a score of 111.3. It is also classified by Dunk Score as the second-best dunk of the season thus far, trailing only this nasty poster by John Collins, which had a score of 113.4:
Personally, we think Jalen’s is better, but Collins’s dunk is still very deserving of being the current top dunk of the 2024/25 NBA season. What a King.
Does Dunk Score Actually Matter?
It’s clear that Dunk Score can help us quantify the most entertaining dunks in the NBA. But is Dunk Score an indicator of anything practical? When we were looking at the components of dunk score, we thought about how this stat could be indicative of things that could help a team win, like paint scoring or rim protection.
With paint scoring, we hypothesized that teams with higher dunk scores would also be better rim finishers since a dunk and a layup are very similar to high-percentage shots. To explore this relationship, we explored a correlation between a team’s average Dunk Score and their average Points in the Paint.
Looking at the above scatterplot, it is pretty clear that there is no relationship between Points in the Paint and Dunk Score.
Rim protection was a bit more of a stretch. With Dunk Score, we hypothesized that the teams with the highest scores contained the best athletes, which could be applicable to defense and rim protection. Just think of Houston’s Terror Twins, Amen Thompson and Tari Eason, who have been wreaking havoc on the league this year with their insane athleticism and lockdown defense.
Similarly, we explored a correlation between a defending team’s average Defensive Contest and their Blocks per Game.
Identical to the paint-scoring hypothesis, there just does not seem to be any sort of relationship between Defensive Contest and Blocks per Game. There were also some other interesting relationships we looked at, including the correlation between BLK% and Avg. Ball Height, but the main conclusion was that while Dunk Score is an interesting metric to study dunks it provides little value in studying the overall game of basketball.
The Ja Morant Composite
Before 2019, a missed dunk was normally just considered what it is, a missed dunk. A player has an open lane and completely whiffs, or he flies off a pick and tries jamming it over a defender and misses the dunk. But suddenly a young man by the name of Ja Morant entered the league and amassed a compilation of “almost dunks”, somehow making an overlooked play of missing a dunk a highlight. While injuries have taken their toll on Ja, leading to his decision to shy away from this style to preserve his body, his reckless abandon attacking the rim produced some of the best highlights the league has ever seen. Thus, in honor of the utter fearless, reckless, and violent rim-attacking style of Ja Morant, we’ve created a subsection of the NBA Dunk Score called the “Ja Morant Composite”. In a league where a 3-point shot is a necessity for even the most athletic guards, we wish to use this composite to see if Ja’s former style of attacking is a relic of the past.
This metric combines Dunk Score’s components of Vertical Leap, Defensive Contest, and Ball Speed Through the Rim to find the NBA’s most athletic, unabashed, and aggressive dunkers.
Unexpectedly it is Cade Cunningham, who stands head and shoulders above the rest of the league with this metric. In fact, at the time our data was collected, Ja Morant, who is the inspiration behind this metric, had only amassed 5 dunks on the season, which does show his commitment to protecting his body, but doesn’t qualify him for his own metric.
While it is surprising that Cade Cunningham won the title of “The most Ja Morant of them All”, when you look at his body of work it is clear he deserves the title. First things first, it is clear he has an argument to be among the top dunkers in basketball.
That dunk is against one of if not the best guard shot-blocker in NBA history, Derrick White! And not only did he do that to White once, he did it twice!
In both plays Cade had other options available, but instead chose to meet Derrick “The Buffalo” White (I am not kidding that is his nickname) at the rim. When we look at some other finishing metrics, Cunningham has moments where he embodies the “Ja Morant” style of attacking, but also moments where it’s clear Ja was just in a league of his own. Cade is currently top 5 in drives per game with 16.5 and top 5 among guards in attempts within 5 feet of the basket with 6.0, which goes to support him embodying the Ja Morant Composite. However, when we compare him to 2021/22 Ja (Ja before the injury and off-court incidents) in metrics like % of shots within 3 feet of the rim, Cade pales in comparison. In fact, each of the top 3 players in the Ja Morant Composite, Jalen Green who is at 20% FGA within 3 feet, Brandon Miller at 11% FGA, and Cunningham with 17% are woefully below 21/22 Ja, who had 33% of his shots fall within 0-3 feet of the rim!
While there are some strong challengers for the Ja Morant Compositite, it is clear that there is no one today that matches Morant’s ferocious attacking style. This leads us to the uninspiring conclusion that the throne of the Ja Morant Compositite is empty. At least for now.
Conclusion
So that’s the NBA Dunk Score in a nutshell. While Dunk Score cannot be used as a practical stat that leads to analyzing the game of basketball, it can help quantify the most entertaining action in basketball and reveal some interesting insights about who is the game’s fiercest rim attacker. There are some improvements to be made with this metric (allowing fans to group by team or by player, introducing more tracking features to have new metrics to analyze to name a few), but the Dunk Score is still a very fun and unique way to analyze basketball’s most engaging event.