If Home Runs Aren't Good for Baseball, Are Dunks Good for Basketball?

When James Naismith invented the sport of basketball in 1891, my guess is that he hardly could have imagined today's game with its super-sized players and aerial acrobatics. Truth be told, the modern game would more than likely have appeared to him as an otherworldly sideshow attraction side by side his original notion of putting a soccer ball through a peach basket attached to a wall.

Early games were typically low-scoring affairs with final scores such as 7-7, 9-7 and even 1-0 commonplace. In today's NBA games, a player might dunk 7 times in a game. Somehow, it seems that if the early players observed by Naismith had been jamming the soccer ball through the peach basket and perhaps even ripping it to the ground, he not only might have been irritated, but he might have done the logical think -- raised the peach basket. Of course, today the dunk is one of the main attractions and moneymakers for the NBA. By contrast, in the WNBA, dunking is fairly rare. On June 30, 2002, Lisa Leslie became the first woman to dunk in a WNBA game while playing for the Los Angeles Sparks. Since then, dunks have been few and far between in the WNBA, and not surprisingly, ticket sales in the WNBA pale in comparison to those in the NBA. Player salaries in the WNBA are also more akin to those of middle class working people in the United States vs. those in the NBA, which more resemble the earnings of oil sheiks.

Hence, one could argue that the WNBA with its lack of dunking is more like the game that James Naismith envisioned, more like basketball than circus ball.