What’s the Most Underrated Skill in Dunking?

There is a thing I hear constantly.

Somebody has a 42 inch vertical and they talk about 44 like it is a door. Once I get to 44, then it gets scary. Then the crazy dunks start.

It does not work like that.

If you are at 42 and you can already windmill, you can do an East Bay. You can. Right now. Two more inches on your vertical is not the thing standing between you and that dunk. What is standing there is ball handling and technique, and no amount of vert is going to do that job for you.

Run it the other way and it gets obvious. Take a guy with a 40 inch vertical who works on his East Bay technique, and a guy with a 44 inch vertical who never touches it. The 40 gets the dunk. Every time.

Vert only matters so much.

I am built like a T-Rex

I should be honest about my own numbers here, because they make the point better than an argument does.

The highest I have ever touched is about 11 foot 4 to 11 foot 5. My standing reach is 7 foot 9 and a half. Short arms. I am basically a T-Rex out there, and I say that with love.

And with those arms I have done under both on a ten foot rim. I have done a reverse 360 East Bay on ten.

None of that came from being higher than everyone else. All of it came from technique and from knowing what my hands are doing while I am in the air.

Where my jump actually came from

Not the weight room.

I was a fast kid. I did a lot of speed training when I was young and I jumped constantly, and that is where the vertical came from. On top of that I did a serious amount of ball handling work, and a lot of finishing drills and layups. All of that transferred, and it transferred better than I understood at the time.

Here is the part people do not expect me to say. Lifting is my weakness. My deadlift, my squat and my power clean are all well below a lot of other professional dunkers.

And a lot of those guys cannot hit an East Bay consistently.

I am not saying that to take a shot at anybody. I am saying it because it is the cleanest evidence I have that the thing everybody trains hardest is not the thing that decides what you can actually do with a ball.

The order I would put them in

If you could only build two of the three, here is my ranking.

One, jumping. Obviously. Without it you cannot do anything at all. This is not up for debate and it is not close.

Two, ball handling. This is the one people skip. You are not jumping. You are jumping with a ball, and then doing something with it in the air. People will spend a year adding inches and spend zero hours on the object they are supposed to be manipulating while they are up there.

Three, lifting.

Third. Not first.

What lifting is actually for

I want to be careful here, because third does not mean useless.

Lifting is what takes you from around 43 to 50. That is its job, and it is the only thing that does that job. Nobody is getting to a 50 inch vertical without lifting a lot of weight. There are eight people on earth with a 50 inch vertical, and every single one of them lifts heavy for their body weight.

So if you want to go chase the ceiling, lift. Seriously.

But if what you actually want is to be a dunker, to have dunks, to be able to do things that make a gym stop, then you are going to get there faster by picking up a ball than by adding two inches you will not know what to do with.

People forget about the ball. That is the whole thing. That is the entire post.

Train the ball.