A reverse slam is a relatively rare dunk for Holmes, but he pulled it off Jan. 12 during a 33-point performance in a 72-62 victory at Duquesne. He dribbled from right to left through the paint as Dusan Mahorcic guarded him. He planted his right pivot foot and then spun to the right and jumped up on the other side of the basket to slam the ball with two hands as another leaped to try to block the attempt.
Holmes bumped chests with teammate Nate Santos as he ran back down the court. Players on the bench reacted with excitement and surprise. Brady Uhl flexed his mucles. Smith covered his eyes as Marvel Allen cradled his head. Jaiun Simon had a shocked look.
Asked after the game if that ranked among his favorite dunks of the year, Holmes said simply, “That was a nice one.”
Through that game, the 15th of the regular season, Holmes ranked eighth in the country with 34 dunks. He had 205 dunks in his career at that point. He ranked second in the country last year with 89 and sixth as a freshman with 82. Holmes broke Obi Toppin’s school record of 191 career dunks in December.
The dunk is a big part of the basketball. It’s an efficient way of scoring because players rarely miss dunks. Holmes has made 95.3% of his dunk attempts (205 of 15).
Coaches didn’t always look at the dunk as a good shot. For a nine-year period, in fact, it was banned from the college game. The NCAA outlawed dunks in 1967 in part because of the dominance of UCLA center Lew Alcindor, who would later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Alcindor scored 20 points in a 79-64 victory against Dayton in the 1967 national championship game just before the dunk was banned. Don Donoher, then Dayton’s coach, favored the new rule. Donoher also wanted a ban on pregame dunking because of a problem with bent rims.
“It’s going to be hard for certain players, such as Alcindor, to get used to it,” he told the Dayton Daily News in March 1967, “but I think it’s a good rule. Now tipping is going to involve a more delicate shot. It’s a lot harder to touch the ball than to just ram it in.”
Earlier in Dayton basketball history, no one dunked more than 7-foot center Bill Uhl, the grandfather of Dayton junior guard Brady Uhl. According to a 1959 Journal Herald story, Uhl was the only Flyer within memory “who used the shot as a functional part of his repertoire” but “didn’t make a practice of it.”
“Coaches don’t advocate this type of crowd-pleasing shot,” Jim Taylor wrote in the Journal Herald. “It’s too risky. The old-fashioned layup, gentle and sure, is the shot most coaches prefer. There’s far less margin for error and less strain, even for the tallest player.”
That’s not true these days. Toppin and Holmes — and Chris Wright before them — have rewritten the history books with too many memorable dunks to count. When the NCAA reversed its ruling on dunks before the 1976-77 season, even Donoher had come around to approve of it.
“It will be very popular among players and fans,” Donoher said. “I don’t think it will do much to change the game otherwise. But it will definitely bring about excitement. I’m just surprised it wasn’t restored sooner.”
The dunk has thrilled fans at UD Arena since the 1970s. Fans love to talk about their favorite dunks almost as much as their favorite buzzer-beaters. Compiling a list of the best and most memorable dunks in UD history is not an easy chore.
I asked fans to name their favorite dunks earlier this month in an attempt to create such a list. It’s heavy on dunks this century, so apologies to players from the 1970s through the 1990s.
The illegal dunk: On Dec. 9, 1974, Dayton freshman forward Erv Giddings threw down a dunk with 19 seconds remaining in a 90-76 victory at Detroit. The dunk was still illegal then. He received a technical foul. Giddings was from Detroit and wanted to impress his friends. Two years later when the dunk was legalized, Giddings said that dunk was worth it and people in Detroit still talked about it.
“I just wanted to get my little ‘yay’ in there,” Giddings said.
Teammate Johnny Davis thought the dunk was “tremendous.” Donoher, of course, didn’t approve.
“He was just letting out some frustration,” Donoher said, “but we’re going to have to talk to him about that.”
Giddings, who was 6-7 and ranks 32nd in school history with 1,227 points, said he could reach almost 12 feet high when jumping. He wanted the dunk to return in part because it was easier for defenders to block layup attempts.
“Against Cincinnati last season, I went for a layup all by myself late in the game, and Brian Williams came from behind me and blocked it,” Giddings said. “It was at a key point in the game, which we lost. If I had scored teh goal, we might have won. The point is, if I had been able to dunk then, there was no way he could have blocked my shot.”
First great dunk: In the first game after the return of dunks to the game, Dayton dunked six times in a 92-69 victory against Western Kentucky at UD Arena on Dec. 4, 1976. Jim Zoffke, of the Journal Herald, mentioned one dunk by Giddings in particular in his game story: a “spectacular behind-the-back, over-the-head rammer that somehow escaped shredding the net.”
Giddings dunked four times and scored 20 points. He and his teammates were inspired three nights earlier by seeing their former teammate, Davis, execute an electrifying dunk with the Portland Trail Blazers in a victory in Indianapolis.
“Johnny was telling me afterwards that since the dunk is back in college ball this year that I’ve got to take care of it,” Giddings said.
Tony Wells and Jim Paxson also had dunks in that first game of the 1976-77 season.
“I could always dunk,” Paxson said. “I just never showed it.”
Punctuation mark: Another memorable Giddings dunk came on March 4, 1978, against Notre Dame in the final game of the regular season at UD Arena. Dayton led 60-56 with 1:40 to play when Paxson beat the press and passed the ball ahead to Giddings, who threw down a one-handed “King Kong style” jam, according to a report by Gary Nuhn, of the Dayton Daily News. The Flyers beat the No. 7 Irish 66-59.
“There was the noise of three dozen rock concerts,” Nuhn wrote. “And the Irish were finished.”
A legend’s memorable dunk: Multiple fans mentioned a tomahawk slam by Dayton’s all-time leading scorer Roosevelt Chapman over Minnesota’s 7-foot center Randy Breuer. The dunk came in a game on Dec. 16, 1982, when Chapman was a junior. A photo by the Journal Herald’s Walt Kleine captured the moment.
Chapman scored 27 points, but Dayton lost the game 71-65 at UD Arena.
Best freshman dunks: London Warren, a 6-0 guard nicknamed the Jacksonville Jet, made his mark as a freshman by throwing down a dunk on Temple’s 6-6 forward Dion Dacons during a fastbreak on Feb. 28, 2007.
”I always had hops — but I get too tired to jump,” Warren said. “That was my only opportunity this season, and I had to take advantage of it. I had maximum explosion.”
• Kyle Davis, a 6-0 guard from Chicago, made a name for himself as a lock-down defender at Dayton from 2013-17, playing for four NCAA tournament teams. He introduced himself to fans with a 12-point performance in an 82-64 victory over California in the Maui Invitational third-place game on Nov. 27, 2013. In that game, he had a dunk that ranked third on SportsCenter’s top-10 plays that day.
“Me and Scoochie (Smith) were talking about it the play before,” Davis said. “They left me wide open, and I didn’t take my chance. I told him on the bench, the next time they leave me open, I’m going to dunk.”
Smith, a fellow freshman, threw the pass that led to the dunk.
”Everyone was just calling me, excited,” Davis said. “I think my mother was the most excited. She always knew I could dunk, but she never saw it on national TV.”
Best dunk ever: No dunk received more mentions from fans than a slam by Chris Wright against Marquette. Wright, a 6-8 forward from Trotwood-Madison, played for the Flyers from 2007-11 and owned the school record for career dunks (177) and dunks in a season (66 in 2009-10) until Toppin came along.
Wright’s best dunk — and maybe the best in school history — came on Nov. 29, 2008, in an 89-75 victory against No. 15 Marquette at the Sears Centre in Hoffman Estates, Ill. He got the ball on a fast break on a pass from Rob Lowery and jumped about 12 feet from the basket, soaring past 5-8 Marquette guard Maurice Acker before throwing down a one-handed slam.
“I’ve had some better ones in high school,” Wright said. “I just jumped. Jumping is what I do.”
Fastest dunk: On Senior Night in 2009, Charles Little caught an alley-oop pass from London Warren five seconds into the game after the Flyers won the opening tip. Little, a 6-6 forward from Cleveland, Tenn., scored 10 points in a 74-61 victory against Duquesne in his final home game.
The play started with Wright winning the tip and tapping it to Matt Kavanaugh, who passed the ball to Warren.
Fan favorite: Kurt Huelsman’s dunk against Xavier on Jan. 16, 2010, also earned a number of mentions by fans.
Huelsman, a 6-foot-10 center from St. Henry not known for his dunking, ran the court on the fast break, caught a pass from Mickey Perry and slammed the ball with two hands as he was fouled by Tu Holloway. Huelsman swung on the rim and his feet touched the backboard as he tried to avoid landing on the defender.
“How about the big fella running the court, baby!” Bucky Bockhorn said on WHIO’s radio broadcast.
Dayton lost the game 78-74 at the Cintas Center.
Credit: DaytonDailyNews
Viral dunk: Toppin, now in his first season with the Indiana Pacers after three seasons with the New York Knicks, has made the between-the-legs dunk his signature move in the NBA. He first did it in a game on Dec. 29, 2018, in a 94-90 victory at UD Arena.
Toppin, who scored 22 points on 9-of-10 shooting, said then it was “for sure” his greatest dunk, but he might not attempt such a dunk again in a close game after coach Anthony Grant talked to him. Dayton led by 11 after the dunk, but Georgia Southern trimmed the deficit to one point twice in the final three minutes.
“He said make sure the next time you look at the clock and see the situation we were in,” Toppin said. “I didn’t even know it was a close game. He just said be mindful of the score and the time.”
Toppin, a 6-9 forward from Ossining, N.Y., replicated the dunk in the final game of his college career on March 7, 2020.
Roof-raising dunks: Ryan Mikesell, a 6-7 forward from St. Henry, dunked six times in his final season with the Flyers in 2020. Toppin overshadowed all the dunkers on the team, but Mikesell had his moments and created a signature celebration, putting both hands in the air and “raising the roof” as he ran to get back on defense.
Credit: David Jablonski - Staff Writer
Credit: David Jablonski - Staff Writer
Unexpected dunks: On March 5, 2014, Dayton ruined Senior Night at Saint Louis with a 72-67 victory. Senior center Matt Kavanaugh, a Centerville High School graduate, had only one basket in the game, but it was a memorable dunk on a fast break.
“That brought the house down,” Kavanaugh said later.
• Point guard Jalen Crutcher, a 6-1 guard from Memphis, Tenn., was responsible for many of Toppin’s dunks. They connected frequently for on alley-oop passes and were best friends off the court. Crutcher dunked only once in the 2020 season but made it count, throwing down a one-handed slam on the fast break after a pass from Ibi Watson in a 66-61 victory at Virginia Commonwealth on Feb. 18.
“I just had my mind made up when Ibi threw me the ball,” Crutcher said.
“That was pretty nice,” Grant said. “He’s got some lift.”
Sibling dunk: In his final season at Dayton, Toppin led the Flyers to a 29-2 record in 2019-20, and that included two victories against Rhode Island, where his brother Jacob played. Before the first matchup on Feb. 11, 2020, at uD Arena, Toppin said he would put his brother on SportsCenter by dunking on him.
“I have to show him who Big Bro’ is!” Obi said.
Toppin did just that, dunked on the fast break as Jacob tried to swat the ball away at the end.
“Didn’t I tell you the other day I was going to put Jacob on SportsCenter?” Obi said after the game.
Clutch dunks: On Feb. 4, 2009, Dayton beat La Salle 63-61 at Tom Gola Arena in Philadelphia on a putback dunk by junior Marcus Johnson with 1.8 seconds to play. He rebounded a missed layup by Wright.
“Coach always told us it’s not the first shot that beats you, it’s rebounding,” said Johnson, a 6-3 guard from Cleveland. “I wanted to be there in case Chris missed.”
• Dayton beat Richmond 55-53 on the road on March 1, 2022, when Malachi Smith threw an in-bounds pass from under the basket to R.J. Blakney for a game-winning alley-oop dunk with 1.2 seconds to play.
“Heck of a pass,” Grant said. “Heck of a finish.”
”Coach drew it up,” Blakney said, “and Mali threw a tough pass, and I had to go and get it.”
Best recent dunk: Toumani Camara, now a rookie with the Trail Blazers, earned the No. 1 spot on SportsCenter’s top plays with a tomahawk dunk in an 82-58 victory at Fordham on Jan. 10, 2023. Fordham’s Rostyslav Novitskyi tried to block the dunk but ended up on a poster instead.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
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