On the off chance you ever wanted to create a fantasy basketball league solely based on the NBA’s most ferocious dunkers, here’s some good news.
Starting this season, the league is going to publish scores for every in-game dunk with a formula measuring more than 25 factors ranging from jump height to ball velocity as it goes through the rim. And yes, style points like body rotation will be included, as will elements that account for whether a defender got posterized in the process.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the highest-rated dunk of 2023-24 was Anthony Edwards’ slam over John Collins, which netted a Dunk Score of 124.4 (in addition to two points).
“Dunks are an incredibly exciting play, one of the most exciting plays in all sports, and we wanted to bring fans closer to that action,” Charles Rohlf, NBA VP for stats technology product development, said. “We saw an incredible opportunity to leverage this data to highlight this awesome play and the incredible athleticism of the players who are doing it.”
Dunk Score, as the NBA is calling the new stat, is the result of months of internal discussion and iteration. Many of the underlying measurements are only available going back to last year, when the league began tracking player bodies in real time beyond their center of mass (so no, we can’t settle any GOAT dunker debates just yet).
While some factors were obvious, Rohlf said, the development process involved philosophical debates over how to fairly judge players of all sizes and account for the degree to which a defender went up for a challenge. Over time, the model was regularly compared to expert eye tests, with the weights applied to certain factors tweaked as time went on.
While the league is touting the new feature as being “AI-calculated,” it’s the result of a lot of human decisions, too. But Dunk Score ultimately represents just one way in which computer vision-based tracking and big data science could evolve the way we watch—and evaluate—sports.
The scoring system will spotlight certain dunks that might not go viral otherwise. While Edwards claimed the top spot, a Chet Holmgren slam against Utah was the second-highest scoring from 2023-24.
“There were many, many iterations where we would look at what the model was doing well, look at what it wasn’t doing well, and then try to create more features that would better and better and better represent what we as fans felt were the best dunks of the year,” Rohlf said.
Fans will be able to view Dunk Score data on the NBA’s app and website, though it will be featured in social posts and content elsewhere as well. The NBA regular season tips off next week, when Collins will get a chance to deliver a leaderboard-topping posterization of his own.
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