Shaquille O’Neal is done pretending to be diplomatic about it. Modern NBA stars, in his eyes, are soft, and he is not going to sugarcoat why they keep skipping the Slam Dunk Contest.
Shaq is out promoting his brand-new Dunkman League, a competitive dunking circuit that includes All-Star Weekend legend Vince Carter and reigning dunk king Mac McClung. During a conversation with Jason Jones of The Athletic, Shaq was asked why he thinks the league’s biggest names refuse to jump into the contest.
He had one word ready. “What’s the word, soft? You can tell them I said it. They’re soft, and they’re scared.”
He is not wrong. The NBA’s flagship dunk showcase has slowly turned into an event with no top-shelf names attached. Jaylen Brown is the last true superstar to actually participate, and he has openly said the reason big names hide from the contest is fear of getting turned into a viral meme.
Shaq basically agrees. He just refuses to use the polite version.
The counterpoint is real too. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Jayson Tatum have all shrugged off dunk contest questions for years because the event has lost its cultural weight. Everything that can be dunked has been dunked. The bar is impossibly high, the exposure is enormous, and the reward, aside from a trophy, is a paycheck they could earn in a single game.
Still, if you are Shaq, none of that matters. In his era, All-Star Weekend was a badge of honor and the dunk contest was the crown jewel of Saturday night. Guys wanted to be there. Guys competed to be there. And when he says today’s players are scared, he is comparing them to a generation that treated the event like a prizefight.
The launch of the Dunkman League is essentially Shaq voting with his wallet. If the NBA is not going to fix the dunk contest, he is going to build his own and let the actual dunkers get paid. That is where names like Mac McClung, currently on a two-way NBA deal, can turn a viral highlight into a real second income.
Whether the Dunkman League catches on is another question. It is fighting for oxygen with the NBA, the WNBA playoffs, and college hoops season. But Shaq has enough gravity to at least give the concept a shot.
The bigger takeaway is that a Hall of Famer is now openly attacking the top of the NBA marketing pyramid, and he is not the first. Charles Barkley says something similar every week. Michael Jordan has hinted at it for years.
The message from the older generation is landing loud. Today’s stars have every skill in the world. What some of them do not have, at least in Shaq’s opinion, is the guts to risk looking bad on national television.
He said it. He is not taking it back. And if you are an NBA superstar reading this, the door to the 2027 dunk contest is wide open. He would love to see who actually walks through it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
