Here’s some good news for those who have always wanted to create a fantasy basketball league purely based on the NBA’s most vicious dunkers.
The group will begin publishing scores for each in-game dunk starting this season using a formula that considers more than 25 factors, including ball velocity as it travels through the rim, to climb height and ball velocity. And sure, there will be elements that consider whether a keeper got posterized while also including design points like body rotation.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highest-rated slam of 2023-24 was Anthony Edwards ‘ bang over John Collins, which netted a Dunk Report of 124.4 ( in addition to two items ).
” Dunks are an incredibly interesting perform, one of the most interesting works in all activities, and we wanted to bring fans closer to that actions”, Charles Rohlf, NBA VP for numbers technology product development, said. ” We saw an incredible opportunity to use this information to highlight this amazing play and the amazing strength of the players involved.”

Dunk Report, as the NBA is calling the fresh rating, is the result of weeks of internal dialogue and generation. Many of the underlying measurements can only be found as of last year, when the league began tracking player bodies in real time beyond their center of mass ( so no, we ca n’t yet settle any GOAT dunker debates ).
While some aspects were clear, according to Rohlf, the growth process involved intellectual debates over how to accurately assess players of all sizes and take into account the difficulty a defender faced when facing a challenge. The design was frequently compared to skilled eye tests over time, with adjustments made to various parameters as time went on.
While the group is touting the new element as being” AI-calculated”, it’s the result of a lot of people judgements, too. Dunk Report, however, is only one example of how big data science and computer vision-based tracking may change the way we watch and evaluate sports.
Certain rebounds that might not otherwise be well received will be highlighted by the grading system. The second-highest scoring bang bang vs. Utah was a Chet Holmgren smash, which came in at 2023-24, while Edwards took the top spot.
There were numerous iterations where we would evaluate what the model was doing well, assess what it was n’t doing well, and then try to develop more features that would improve, improve, and better reflect what the fans thought were the year’s best dunks, according to Rohlf.
Fans will be able to see Dunk Score data through the NBA’s apps and website, as well as other sources of social media content and material. Next week will be the start of the NBA regular season, when Collins may have the opportunity to offer his own leaderboard-topping poster.