Now that football season is over, basketball is back in action, and the annual NBA Slam Dunk Contest is about to hit the court in San Francisco. As the title suggests, basketball players can show ...

The athletic feats are poetry in motion, from making a no-look pass and jamming a slam dunk to diagramming a perfect play and nailing a three-point shot. Think of basketball as a chess match.

In a moment of get-off-my-lawn petulance, I once argued in the pages of Sports Illustrated that the NBA All-Star Game’s Slam Dunk Contest ... had proclaimed the dunk “basketball’s highest ...

They literally and figuratively elevate basketball and are at the heart of “Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk,” a must-read jam of a book by Philadelphia ...