Toronto Raptors: 3 most valuable NBA Top Shot Highlights in history
By Ben Fisher
No. 2: Vince Carter’s 2000 Dunk Contest Winner
You’ll notice that when outlining the ground rules for this exercise, I mentioned limiting the list to on-court highlights, but never specifically said that it had to be a clip from an actual game.
While it can be seen as an embarrassment that one of the franchise’s cornerstone moments prior to their current run of success came in a dunk competition in Oakland, the night when Vince Carter brought league-wide attention to the Raptors shouldn’t be understated.
Vince Carter made the Raptors must-see TV
While Carter’s Raptor teams topped out with his miss on a potential game-winner in Game 7 of their 2001 Eastern Conference Semifinals series against the Philadelphia 76ers, his gravity-defying performance in 2000 sparked the frenzy of ‘Vinsanity’ and made Toronto relevant in NBA circles.
That, in turn, has helped contribute to a current reality in which the Raps have an NBA title and Canada has never a bigger presence in the league.
Significance aside, the video’s value comes in its spectacle, even more than 20 years later. Sure, some of the dunks – particularly the between-the-legs alley-oop – have been duplicated in the years since, but the athletic, acrobatic show that Carter put on was largely unprecedented at the time.
That much is evident in the reactions of a camcorder-holding (remember, 2000) Shaq and the bewildered expressions (post-forearm-in-net dunk) of Jason Kidd and Steve Francis.