How to cheat gravity in basketball

How did Anthony Edwards get so high on his game-saving block against Indiana? How did he get so high dunking on John Collins?? This detailed breakdown analyzes the hang time and physics of the “Chambers Boost” that causes players to cheat gravity and jump higher than ever.

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#ThinkingBasketball

Can an NBA player jump so high that their chin is Above the Rim on one of Michael Jordan’s legendary dunks his head was so close to the hoop he could practically kiss the rim Gerald Green blew out a candle on the rim and he can basically look into the hoop so what

Would it take for someone to get their entire Head Above the Rim well last week we finally got the answer AJ Green little tough BL oh andreon J much to the Delight of the king’s bench Andre cleared the rim on this dunk and it might be the highest an

NBA player has ever been in a game and what’s shocking about this is that Jackson was only fifth in the vertical leap at last year’s combine and he’s only about 66 so how in the world did he get so High Jackson’s official combined vertical leap was measured at 392 in

Which is some great bounciness but it means his maximum head height would be about 9 F 10 in off the floor and yet his head is well over the rim here reaching closer to 11 ft so did Jackson get the right training program over the summer and develop the world’s greatest

Vertical was there a spring in the floorboard in Sacramento or was something else pushing Andre to new heights this is not the first gravity defying dunk to go viral 11 years ago Victor Dukes looked into the rim at Arkansas State and 8 years ago tawon Scott flew like Superman at Herkimer

College so how are these players able to do this when physics says they shouldn’t on a normal vertical leap a player accelerates off the floor reaches an apex and then comes back down to the ground and that flight path is basically determined by their jumping Force off

The floor but on this play Scott’s flight path is changed by a teammate jumping into him while he’s in the air in other words some of his jumping force is transferred to Scott giving him an extra boost midf flight on Jackson’s dunk it wasn’t a teammate but the

Opponent jumping up and into him well in the air to provide that boost and this contact can take place on different parts of the body LeBron’s right leg hits Kevin Love’s arms here and love is bracing himself and that gives James a little extra lift in the air to go and

Touch the sky and we call this lift the chambers boost a term coined by Jay Kyle man to describe this subtle midair assist a leaper gets from another player and it’s named after Tom chambers’s legendary 1989 dunk over Mark Jackson where he uses his knees to springboard

Off Jackson’s chest and jump over him and even though Jackson wasn’t jumping he’s still providing a boost by anchoring himself to the floor Victor Dukes literally uses his Defender as a stool with his foot but this same physics are in Play When a leaper hits someone with their knees or even their

Arms in fact many of the Great facials served up in NBA history have a subtle Chambers boost to them including Blake Griffin’s collection of baptisms back in the Lob City Clipper days where he caught a little boost from his poster victims on the way up and even when poor

Tima mozgov came over to take a charge again those arms into the midsection provid added a little extra hang time to help Blake throw it in the rim you can actually see how much force is displaced horizontally on these Blake examples with pow and him crashing into

Each other and mozgov sort of holds Blake up from moving toward the basket and the more vertical the direction of this Force the more of a vertical boost the leaper receives and the Boost is subtle but also profound on a normal Blake Griffin Mega dunk he’s in the air

For about 8/10 of a second on the mozgov dunk he was up there for 910 of a second and when he crushed pal Gasol’s face he was Airborne for nearly a second a 20 or 25% increase in Hang Time might not sound like much but a similar increase

In Jump height means jumping to about 9 ft versus 11 ft so it’s actually an enormous change in hang time if if we go back to Kyle man’s favorite Chambers boost Dirk minifield was in the air for something like 1.15 seconds in 1983 to put this into perspective one of

The great aerial athletes of the player tracking era Zack LaVine is only up in the air for around 9/10 of a second on a typical jump years ago Sports Science brought in Jordan Farmar to test out his hang time and he peaked at just over8 8/

T0 of a second and that’s about how long Michael Jordan was in the air on his famous foul line dunk in the 88 Dunk Contest the chambers boost has actually taken over the dunk contest before going back to Nate Robinson using Dwight Howard’s back as a springboard to launch over him in

2009 now that doesn’t mean a 59 human jumping over a 6’1 person isn’t an impressive or visually stunning dunk we’re just observing the phenomenon here Nate’s unassisted dunk over Spud Web in 2006 still had incredible hang time but he used that little boost just to clear Howard M mclung is another multi-time

Winner who loves to boost only he pushes off the ball which is being held by a spotter while he stands on the floor mcl’s normal hang time on an unspotted dunk is close to that 910 mark because he’s an absurd leaper but he has a hang time of

1.05 seconds on this dunk and you can see his spotters neck Buckle a little from the extra Force ma gets pushing down into the ball before he Scoops it up for the Finish Aaron Gordon took the dunk contest Chambers boost to new heights literally in his legendary 2006

Showdown with LaVine where Gordon uses the same trick to boost himself over the mask SC and this is a borderline gymnastics move with Aaron’s Head Above the Rim and a total flight time of more than 1.1 seconds that’s more than 30% of the hang time he had on a non- boosted dunk

From that same contest most Chambers boosts aren’t that extreme though Anthony Edwards takes a page out of Blake Griffin’s book throwing this ball in after he hits John Collins but he’s only slightly higher and with a touch more hangtime than his usual allout un assisted leaps two of LeBron’s most viral mindbending leaping

Efforts had extremely subtle Chambers boosts he gets more of a nudge up in the air to jump over John Lucas III and his eyes look like they were Above the Rim against Portland after receiving just a subtle bump on the way up that actually turned him around in the air even Vince

Carter’s Olympic dunk has a little four arm assist on the way up as he stuffed poor Frederick Vice into the annals of basketball history until last week my collection of Chambers boosts was limited to dunks there was this one time that Shannon Brown caught a bump blocking Mario West but these would

Almost always be fouls like this and so you don’t really see Chambers boosts on defense but then this happened Minesota three-point lead he missed it are not going with a timeout they Advance the ball n Smith lays it up oh man oh man is Right an Edwards got a Chambers Boost

From Jaden McDaniels and hit his head on the rim while blocking this shot to save the game and he was going chin level to the basket if he didn’t hit his head because of his incredible vertical and the Boost from jmac and it’s clearly not the safest play thankfully the man could

Fall like a cat but I’m not sure anything is cooler and more unique than a Chambers boost block essentially Newton’s laws are at work here in one way or another Force equals mass time acceleration and all that with one object exerting a force on another with an equal and opposite

Reaction and all that wonderful High School goodness so next time you see someone’s head around or Above the Rim check to see if there’s an extra point of contact that alters their flight path in the air before they throw it down or apparently even block the shot because it just

Might be the result of the incredible Chambers boost there was actually a video game called Lakers versus Celtics that gave Tom Chambers a double clutch Unstoppable dunk from like the three-point line because of this famous Chambers boost dunk if you want to sport his channel directly check out