UNCASVILLE, Conn. – Vince Carter remembers the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest like it just happened, when he went from an up-and-comer to a full-fledged phenom.
He had been the NBA Rookie of the Year the season before with Toronto and now he was a first-time All-Star. But when he slammed the ball down in Oakland, leaping so high with such force that he put his arm through the rim, he had created perhaps the biggest highlight of a Hall of Fame career that would last another 20 years.
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“What the dunk contest did for me, overnight it changed my life,” Carter said Saturday during a press conference at Mohegan Sun Casino to discuss his induction.
Some players have careers like that, where they seem to hit the ground running from the moment they are drafted and never stop — in Carter's case until he had played an NBA-record 22 seasons.
And then there are guys like Chauncey Billups.
The No. 3 pick in the 1997 draft was traded by Boston in his first season and had already played for four teams in his first four seasons.
There's more than one way to reach the Hall of Fame.
Billups eventually found his footing and on Sunday will join Carter as the headline names in the 13-member class that will be enshrined in Springfield, Massachusetts, not far from where his first NBA stop went so poorly that some labeled him a bust.
Billups, now the coach of the Portland Trail Blazers, wouldn't have changed a thing.
“It’s just my journey,” Billups said. “Everybody’s is totally different and I say this all the time. From the time that I was drafted to today being on this stage and being this weekend, like, it was a tough road for me. There was not a lot of traffic on that road.”
Lakers defensive ace Michael Cooper, high-scoring Phoenix star Walter Davis and former Knicks champion Dick Barnett are the other NBA players in the class, with Seimone Augustus and Michele Timms making it from the WNBA. Jerry West is going in as a contributor — his third induction being enshrined as a player and with the 1960 U.S. Olympic team — along with Doug Collins and Pacers owner Herb Simon, and coaches Bo Ryan and Harley Redin from college and Charles Smith from high school.
Augustus will have one eye elsewhere as she readies for the ceremony. The Minnesota Lynx, the team she helped win four WNBA championships, will be playing Game 2 of the WNBA Finals in New York on Sunday afternoon.
“I’ve gotten so many text messages like, ‘We wanted to be there,’” said Augustus, who added that her response is: “Like, go out there and get Game 2 and hopefully bring home a championship.”
Billups eventually got one, the NBA Finals MVP when the Detroit Pistons won the 2004 championship. He would make five All-Star teams with the Pistons and Denver Nuggets, but that was after the rocky start to his career.
There were the 51 games in Boston before a trade to Toronto, with short stays in Denver and Minnesota preceding his arrival in Detroit. There were questions about what kind of point guard he was — or even if he was really a point guard.
“It just didn’t translate fast enough, but I never believed what they said about me,” Billups said. “I just kept fighting, kept scrapping and it turned around.”
Carter never got a ring like Billups or Cooper — who won five of them with the Lakers — but it wasn't his primary motivation as he kept playing late in his career, noting some of the teams he had joined weren't serious contenders.
“I played the game because I love it and it wasn’t about chasing money and honestly it wasn’t about chasing rings,” Carter said.
He had hoped to play 15 years in the NBA, but once he got there said he'd play a couple more years. He ended up becoming the only player in league history to appear in four different decades.
The only reason the dunk contest championship wasn't the undisputed highlight of his career is because he had another entry later in 2000, when he soared over France's Frederic Weis for a rim-shaking slam while helping the U.S. win an Olympic gold medal.
He had been envisioning his chance to slam for years, staying up late to watch and record All-Star Saturday nights. He was so amped up for his opportunity that he treated it like a real game day, taking his usual afternoon nap.
Then he delivered when it was time to put on a show, saying that he had never even tried the arm-through-the-rim slam until that night.
“When I got that opportunity, I looked into the stands and I was on another level as far as just excitement and hype for the moment,” Carter said. “I felt the routine that I had the night before wasn’t going to win and I took a chance, and we’re here today talking about the good because it could have gone bad.”
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