Who are the best NBA dunkers? Who are the "worst" dunkers?

Put differently: what the heck is happening in Chicago?

Kevin Durant famously once said, “NBA fans don’t like anything about the NBA,” and if you’re online as much as I am, it can definitely feel that way at times.

But there’s one thing that everyone loves: dunks.

Basketball’s most iconic play is simply a player jumping up and pushing the ball through the hoop from above. It’s not complicated, but it is beautiful. Whether it’s someone cocking the ball back to their knees…

…or a yam so explosive that both dunker and dunkee become collateral damage in the relentless pursuit of artistic perfection…

…there is no more exciting play to watch.

You know what else is exciting? Numbers and graphs! So I’m here to deep-dive the dunk.

Per data I compiled from Basketball-Reference and the league’s play-by-play data, the league made 11,595 dunks last year and only missed 1,425. That’s a conversion rate of 89.1% — far better than the expected value on free throws, three-pointers, or anything else you can name. That means that the dunk is both the coolest and most effective shot in basketball.

Let’s break it down further. One caveat: this data does not include misses resulting in a foul, as there aren’t good ways to distinguish between layups and dunks that result in fouls. Made dunks drawing an and-one are included. So keep that in mind.

First, who tried to dunk the most? The leaders will not surprise you:

Water pistol to your head, you probably would have guessed that Giannis Antetokounmpo and Rudy Gobert were the two most prolific dunkers both on a per-game and an absolute basis. Still, the gap between them and third-place Dereck Lively is astonishing. Thanks primarily to the minutes gap between the players, they’re averaging nearly one more dunk per game than Lively!

39-year-old LeBron James comes in as the 30th-most prolific dunker in absolute terms. I once did a whole analysis on the dunking aging curve, and my conclusion was that the majority of players dunk the most (as a percentage of their shots) as rookies, and most of the remaining players dunk the most in their second or third years. James, naturally, was an outlier:

That chart ended before the most recent season, but his 7.1% dunk attempt rate this year (as a percentage of total field goal attempts) was his highest number since the 2018-19 season. It’s remarkable how steady he remains.

Speaking of dunk rate, who is dunking the most as a percentage of their field goals?