NBA 2015 Dunk Contest Predictions

Last season the NBA rolled out a new format for the dunk contest that pitted the 3 Eastern Conference players against the 3 Western Conference players. These east vs west competitions started with a freestyle round where each conference had 90 seconds to throw down as many impressive dunks as possible. The winning team was then allowed to choose the dunking order for the battle round. In the battle round 1 player from each conference faced off in traditional dunk contest fashion with the loser being eliminated from the competition. Surprisingly though the east won each of their first battle round match ups leading to a situation where the dunk contest was as short as possible. Granted nobody expected the east to dominate the battle round and the thought of one player from the west having to then win two more battle rounds against the east can lead to a really exciting narrative where one player carried their entire conference proving across 3 rounds that he is better than the 3 best dunkers the other conference could throw at him. I hope they give this format one more shot because in theory this format can be really exciting, it just had it's least interesting scenario play out last year.

East:

1. John Wall (Washington Wizards)

2. Terrence Ross (Toronto Raptors)

3. Andre Drummond (Detroit Pistons)

West:

1. Andrew Wiggins (Minnesota Timberwolves)

2. Eric Griffin (Dallas Mavericks)

3. Kenneth Faried (Denver Nuggets)

Raptors Preseason Begins!

Tonight the Toronto Raptors played their first preseason game against the Sacramento Kings winning 99-94. While these are only observations from one game it's already apparent that the Raptors have improved in at least 2 aspects during the offseason. 

1. The bigger the better: Many of the Raptors decided to bulk up during the offseason including Terrence Ross, DeMar DeRozan, and Jonas Valanciunas each doing so for seemingly different reasons.

     Ross was criticized after the playoff series against the Nets for being too skinny because it allowed Joe Johnson and Paul Pierce to back him down in the post leading to easy buckets. He seemed to have taken the criticism as best he could and simply responded by coming back with more bulk to deal with larger the sg/sf  in the league. 

     DeMar DeRozan made his first NBA all-star appearance last season and he seems intent on making sure he will make it back there this year. DeRozan already had enough weight on him to deal with larger apposing guards but he seems to have made "mad gains bro" over the summer in an effort to make his drives to the basket even more deadly. DeMar has shown to be a great finisher at the rim but plenty of big men can still get in his path forcing him to lean and attempt a more difficult shot. This year however thanks to his weight gain DeRozan can now finish against the stronger big men which will hopefully lead to more and-one opportunities. 

     Last season Jonas Valanciunas averaged 8.8 rebounds a game which is quite respectable for a players second year in the league but still not enough to make a title run. Jonas doesn't have many issues reading how a rebound will come off the boards but rather he struggled with stopping larger centres who used their size to push him out of the spot for the rebound. Although there aren't a lot of these behemoth type players in the league this was still an issue that led to Chuck Hayes having to play extra minutes which isn't exactly what the Raptors would like. So to combat this he's gotten a little bigger and I'm sure his rebounding numbers this season will improve because of this. 

2. Tyler Hansbrough spent the summer shooting corner 3's apparently.... I guess he just saw how much people enjoyed seeing Amir Johnson shoot 3's and he thought it would be fun if he could shoot them too. Either way I doubt he will be seeing very many minutes next season but hey it's nice to see that even the players deep into the rotation are working hard to enhance their game.