LaVine exits All-Star stage for Kobe and the NBA’s best

But Minnesota’s Zach LaVine and Orlando’s Aaron Gordon made a thunderous statement about the NBA’s best form of entertainment: that the dunk is king.

It is the mid-season break for the National Basketball Association, with All-Star Weekend taking place. He was forced to play an overtime round against defending (and now repeat) champion Zach LaVine, and if I had to guess, it’s because one of Gordon’s dunks involved a hoverboard. Andre Drummond and Will Barton were understated and definitely didn’t bring their best dunks if they wanted to win the contest this year. “Yeah, and I don’t want to get into – everybody’s probably going to say something about Mike and all them and Dr. J.”, LaVine said.

The eventual victor of the night was LaVine, but it’s Gordon’s performance that will go down in history. And yes, this was better than the revered duel between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins in 1988 because LaVine and Gordon produced better dunks.

Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson put on a show in a teammate-versus-teammate affair in the Three-Point Contest, but it wound up not even coming close to what LaVine and Gordon accomplished. If you really look at it as a whole, we were doing dunks that professional dunkers take four or five tries to do and we were doing it on the first try. “It was insane. In my opinion, yes”.

Gordon went high-low-high with the ball on a two-handed reverse dunk that drew a score of 47 and boos from the Air Canada Centre crowd, who thought it deserved more.

Earlier in the night, Minnesota Timberwolves rookie center Karl-Anthony Towns won the Skills Challenge, beating 5-foot-9 Boston Celtics guard Isaiah Thomas in the final round.

However, Lavine’s dunks were also awesome and were deserving of ideal scores of 50.

Zach LaVine flies in for his second straight dunk contest win.

Gordon, using the Orlando mascot as a setup man, took the ball off his head and then jumped over him.

They started “slowly” by just making dunks on their own.

There were leaps from the free-throw line, windmills, dragon props and through-the-legs buckets.

“Ain’t nothing left”, LaVine said. Jeremy Evans of the Dallas Mavericks won this contest in 2012 and I couldn’t tell you what dunks he did. When it came this years contest, Curry came up strong in the first round, draining 21 three pointers, missing just a couple of shots. You know, Ive never been on a team with someone who shoots better than me, so its a privilege to work with him every day.

J.J. Redick had planned to open one had he won the three-point shooting contest, but the Clippers shooting guard did not make it out of the first round of a competition won by Golden State’s Klay Thompson.

NBA Skills Challenge: I’m not a fan of Big men being added to the Skills Challenge, but I will give the NBA credit for mixing up the rules for a change.