Mac McClung does not have an NBA job, a training camp invite, or a guaranteed roster spot anywhere in North America, and this week he found the most efficient use imaginable for that free time: clearing Draymond Green’s parked car, and two of the people standing near it, for a reverse dunk on cable television.
McClung pulled it off during his Group D stage at Shaquille O’Neal’s Dunkman League in Atlanta, advancing to the August 22 championship round in the process. The dunk itself was clean and absurd in the way his dunks tend to be; the car was not a prop borrowed for the occasion but Green’s actual vehicle, parked courtside because that’s apparently how this league does staging now.
None of this should have surprised anyone who has watched McClung work before. He is a three-time NBA Slam Dunk Contest champion, the only player in NBA history to win it three years running, and in 2024 he jumped over a seated Shaquille O’Neal to help lock down that streak. In 2025 he cleared a Kia to finish the three-peat. Draymond Green’s sedan just makes it two makes of car in two years; at some point automakers should start bidding for the privilege of getting jumped over on national television.
The highlight reel leaves out the part where Mac McClung doesn’t have an NBA roster spot, and hasn’t for a while. He played 11 total games last season, three with the Indiana Pacers and eight with the Chicago Bulls, and neither team decided he was worth keeping around. He’s since signed with Basquet Girona of Spain’s Liga ACB, a club owned by former NBA center Marc Gasol, which is a perfectly respectable career and also a considerable distance from where a two-time G League MVP and the G League’s all-time leading scorer probably expected to land. “I applied as much pressure as I can in the G League,” McClung has said, adding that he’d “done everything I could in that league.” He wasn’t wrong; the league just didn’t have anywhere left to put him.
The NBA’s actual offseason programming is a rerun channel running on autopilot: summer league box scores nobody remembers by midsummer, trade rumors recycling the same handful of names, the occasional gym video from a max-contract wing insisting his jumper looks completely different now. It’s built to be forgotten in the gap between June’s last game and October’s first whistle. Into that gap walked a Hall of Famer with a checklist of 24 dunkers, four groups of six, and a $500,000 grand prize.
Shaq’s Dunkman League and the $500,000 grand prize turned out to be more compelling than anything the league office greenlit this summer; the thing has pulled over 150 million weekly social-media views, according to Forbes, which is the kind of number the NBA usually only generates when a player shoves an official. The league didn’t lose that audience to a rival broadcaster or a competing sport. It lost it to a Kia, and now a Green family sedan.
Draymond Green, spending Draymond’s summer of opting out of $27.7 million rather than reporting to Golden State Warriors camp, works Dunkman League as a commentator alongside Vince Carter, which is how he ended up standing near his own car while a man with no NBA team cleared it for a highlight neither of their actual employers is producing. That’s the arrangement now: the league’s best offseason content comes from a guy nobody signed, on a broadcast that airs across TNT, TBS, truTV and HBO Max, refereed in the booth by a four-time champion currently not showing up to work either.
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McClung flies to Spain soon to start his actual job. He’ll clear the August 22 championship round first, presumably over some other unlucky commentator’s car, while the NBA’s actual offseason keeps producing nothing worth remembering. The league didn’t need to build any of this. It just needed someone with a car and someone willing to jump over it, and it turns out neither one currently works for the NBA.
