Serge Ibaka No Stranger to Dunk Contests

The Thunder forward has won a professional dunk contest before.

Thursday, May 26th 2011, 12:11 pm

By: News On 6

Serge Ibaka No Stranger to Dunk Contests

Originally Published: Feb 4, 2011 6:11 PM CDT

Grant Belcher
Oklahoma Sports Staff Writer

OKLAHOMA CITY – When Thunder coach Scott Brooks learned that his player, Serge Ibaka, was going to be in the NBA dunk contest, his prognosis wasn’t exactly positive.

He said the only dunks he has seen from Ibaka are in-game, normal dunks.

If that is true, Brooks might not have been paying much attention when his organization was scouting Ibaka in the first place.

Brooks was an assistant with the then-Seattle Supersonics starting in 2007-08, and in the offseason, when his team was heavily scouting Ibaka, the 6-10 forward went out and won a professional dunk contest.

In July of 2008 when he was playing with Ricoh Manresa abroad, Ibaka won the ACB (Spain) dunk contest, garnering a near-perfect score.

While it could be argued that he wasn’t dunking against NBA competition, his dunk contest opponents that year at least have NBA ties. Pops Mensah-Bonsu played for several different NBA teams, while Victor Claver was drafted in the first round of the 2009 NBA draft before suffering a serious injury. The fourth participant, Pablo Aguilar, is expected to enter the 2011 NBA draft.

The ACB, easily Spain's top professional league, has produced NBA talent such as Pau and Marc Gasol, Luis Scola and Ricky Rubio.

The quality of Ibaka’s dunks in the 2008 contest speaks for itself. His first dunk, a classic one-handed dunk from the free-throw line, was effortless and from the same distance as Michael Jordan’s signature free-throw line dunks.

For his second dunk, Ibaka succeeded in imitating Andre Iguodala’s famous 2006 dunk, taking an alley-oop pass off the back of the backboard and dunking in front of it.

That dunk gathered a perfect score from the judges of the ACB contest, giving Ibaka the title and a 7,000-euro prize (about $9,000 U.S.).

So Ibaka has proven he can dunk as effectively as the NBA’s dunk contest participants – the question now is whether he and “coach” Kevin Durant can be creative enough to make up their own.

According to Durant, that won’t be a problem. He said recently that he and Ibaka have a creative prop in mind that the dunk contest has never seen before.

One of Ibaka’s opponents, Oklahoma native Blake Griffin, also has experience winning dunk contests.

Griffin won the 2007 McDonald’s High School All-American dunk contest and has, to say the least, displayed an impressive arsenal of dunks through the first half of his rookie season.

Contestant No. 3 – Javale McGee of the Washington Wizards – has 81 dunks on the season so far, adding up to nearly two per game.

And the mystery selection of the contest, 6-1 point guard Brandon Jennings of Milwaukee, has just two dunks the entire season, according to CBSSportsline.com’s Dunk-o-meter.

So while anyone, even Serge Ibaka, would look like an underdog compared to Blake Griffin, Ibaka is not as in-the-dark as most people around the league probably think.