Orlando Magic News for March 25th: The Dunk Contest Will Not Die

The dunk contest, which featured Dwight Howard defeating Gerald Green in the final round. happened last February. The blogosphere is still buzzing about it.
File photo by Bill Haber, the Associated Press

• Krolik of FreeDarko invokes the Dunk Contest, and the Superman Dunk in particular, in this must-read piece on form, function, and high-school-to-the-League players:

  When [Dwight Howard] plays, the court pulsates with the power of dunk. And yet his dunk contest was marked by triumphs of style rather than substance, with his signature dunk being a show of smoke and mirrors while THE BIRTHDAY CAKE was, like Howard's tragically futile sticker dunk, a demonstration of substance-as-style, and the contest ended with [Gerald] Green doing a ridiculously difficult dunk that didn't photograph well (seriously, try jumping off a hardwood floor in socks), while Howard did a two-handed windmill using a toy hoop.

  Krolik also argues that Dwight, Amare Stoudemire, LeBron James, etc. benefitted from coming straight out of high school: "[B]y being allowed to find the music of their own games, the HS guys eventually found an off-beat form of truth as yet unrivaled by any other category of player." Bookmark FreeDarko. You'll thank me later.

• More on Dwight and dunking: the Superman dunk is matched up against the aforementioned BIRTHDAY CAKE dunk in the Ball Don't Lie Bedlam Tournament... and it's losing. Will someone knock some sense into these Yahoo! readers?
• Speaking of knocking some sense into people, check out the comments in this thread at Denton's board. Stan Van Gundy told reporters today that he wants Dwight to be more vocal and aggressive when asking for the ball on offense. One reader calls Stan "a little troll who likes the media limelight," then later adds that Doc Rivers is a better coach.
• The ubiquitous Tom Ziller sorta name-drops J.J. Redick in today's The Rotation piece at FanHouse. Check the "electability" chart at the end of the entry: Ziller pegs J.J. as "conservative" and "not electable", and similar to -- gulp -- Pat Riley in both those respects. So that's why Stan is so reluctant to play J.J...

Don't forget the game thread for the Magic's battle with the Spurs tonight.