As a child, Jaquez dunked ‘like Shaq.’ Saturday he dunked over Shaq
INDIANAPOLIS
Miami Heat rookie
Jaime Jaquez Jr. didn’t celebrate his 23rd birthday with the NBA’s Slam
Dunk crown.
Jaquez, who turned 23 on Sunday, was eliminated in the first round of the Slam Dunk Contest as part of All-Star Weekend on Saturday Night at Lucas Oil Stadium. Mac
McClung of the G
League’s Osceola Magic won the event for the second straight season.
How did the contest work?
In the two-round event, five judges scored each dunk from 40 to 50. The average of the five judges’ scores went down as the individual dunk score.
All four competitors got two dunks in the first round, and the two players with the highest composite score for their two dunks (maximum score of 100 and a minimum score of 80) advanced to the head-to-head final round. Those two players then also got two dunks in the championship round, and the one with the highest final round composite score for those final two dunks earned the Slam Dunk crown.
Jaquez’s two dunks in the first round received a composite score of 94.2, which was the lowest score among the four participants. The top two, Boston Celtics forward Jaylen Brown and McClung, moved on to the second round.
For Jaquez’s first dunk, he had Basketball Hall of Famer and former Heat center Shaquille O’Neal stand at the edge of the restricted area. Jaquez then cleared the 7-foot-1 O’Neal to throw down a powerful dunk on his first attempt for an average score of 47.4 from the judges.
“Listen, I ain’t gonna lie. I didn’t practice jumping over Shaq,” Jaquez said of his first dunk. “I used Bam [Adebayo] as practice. But there’s a big height difference. So I was really nervous when I saw Shaq out there. I’ve seen him a bunch of times. But when he’s standing there, I was definitely feeling nervous.”
Jaquez chose O’Neal as the person to jump over for a reason after a video recently resurfaced from when Jaquez was a young child. “I’m dunking like Shaq,” a young Jaquez said in the video before dunking on a short kids basketball hoop.
“I know that video was going around about me dunking like Shaq when I was a baby,” said Jaquez, who has been among the NBA’s top rookies this season after the Heat selected him with the 18th overall pick in last year’s draft. “So I thought it would be cool, the first dunk I go out there and jump over him. Kind of tie it all together, full circle moment for myself. So I was really happy about it.”
On his second attempt, Jaquez bounced the ball to himself and double clutched before spinning 180 degrees and completing the dunk for an average score of 46.8.
But that wasn’t enough for Jaquez to advance past the first round.
Jaquez became the fourth Heat player in franchise history to take part in the Slam Dunk Contest, joining Billy Thompson (1990), Harold Miner (1993 and 1995), and Derrick Jones Jr. (2020). The short list of Heat participants who have won the event still only includes Miner, who claimed the dunk crown in 1993 and 1995, and Jones, who was the dunk champion in 2020.
As for the other events during All-Star Saturday
Night in Indianapolis,
Team Pacers (Tyrese Haliburton, Bennedict Mathurin, Myles Turner) won the Skills Challenge, Milwaukee Bucks guard Damian Lillard won the Three-Point Contest for the second straight season, and Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry won the ThreePoint Shootout over Sabrina Ionescu of the WNBA’s New York Liberty.
Jaquez was the Heat’s lone representative on All-Star Saturday Night this year. He also took part in Friday night’s Rising Stars event during his eventful first All-Star Weekend.
“I would say it was a lot of fun,” Jaquez said of his first All-Star Weekend experience. “I had a great time this weekend. I got to meet a lot of cool people, shake a lot of hands. So just to be able to get into an environment like this with such an amazing group of talent all across the board was cool.”