2010/11 StroShow Award Winner: Blake Griffin!

Those of you who never followed my Daily Poster thread on InsideHoops.com are probably confused as sh!t right now. The StroShow Award is given out annually in honor of my favorite dunker (and basketball player) of all time, Stromile Swift. Little Stro tribute…

The award goes to the player who appears most frequently on the posterizer list (you know, that thing I update every day with the POTD) each season. Basically, it determines the real NBA dunking champion… none of that Sprite Slam Dunk BS where the fans vote on an array of gimmicky crap. This is about mashin’ in people’s grills, son! So anyway, seven players actually tied for first place with four appearances this season, so I had to create a tie-breaker. What I’ve decided to do is take each player’s winning dunks and tally up their total Starbury Nasty Face count. I figure whoever averaged the most faces per dunk deserves to hoist the trophy. That player was Blake Griffin, who’s posterizations made Stephon Marbury’s face scrunch up 8.25 times per slam. So, big ups to Blake Griffin! Here’s a photo of my main man receiving the prestigous award…

Even though he came up with the smallest number of posters of any StroShow Award winner over the three seasons I’ve been doing this (Amare won it with 9 last year, Wade got it with 7 in ’08/09), I feel like he earned it. Dudes simply smartened up and stopped getting in his way a couple months into the season, so he couldn’t dunk on ‘em anymore. He still had the sickest season of in-game dunking that I’ve ever seen in my life, he just couldn’t keep bangin’ on dudes who were fleeing the scene.

Moving right along to the next award, Poster of the Year, well… that one’s going to Mr. Blake Griffin as well. Here he is accepting the award (man, Blake’s already racked up a ton of hardware!).

I’m sure you already know exactly which dunk I’m giving it to, so I won’t bother with any introduction. This slam doesn’t need one anyway…

This was a no-brainer for me, and I feel that most would agree. The folks who wouldn’t like to point out the fact that Griffin’s hand never came into contact with the rim. Alright, I hear you… I didn’t like Dwight Howard’s “Superman” dunk because we all know he came up short and luckilly flung it through the hoop. The only reason I didn’t like that is because it was in a contest, though… and because he clearly did it on accident (get the f@ck outta here with that “he jumped so high he threw it in!” BS. That’s crap! He took off too far out, and he didn’t make it to the rim, period). An in-game slam of that variety? I’ve got no problem with that. Things are different when there’s a seven-foot behemoth between you and the basket preventing your hand from reaching the rim as the ball is thrown down. Blake was above the rim, and he threw the ball downward through it… hard. Not only that, Griffin appeared to be floating for a moment before the finish. He just kept getting higher, and higher, and higher… and then it was like he froze for just a moment while he was right at the peak of his jump. This dunk is just freaky to watch… it doesn’t look like it should be humanly possible. I guess that’s probably because it wasn’t until this dude came about.

Now it’s time for the Team Poster Award (given to the team that accounted for the most POTDs)… Blake will be involved once again. His Clippers, accepted by most everyone as the league’s most electrifying team, racked up an impressive 14 winning posters. That’s a pretty damn solid number… here’s how it breaks down: Gordon, Jordan, and Griffin had four each; Randy Foye and Eric Bledsoe accounted for the other two. Fourteen doesn’t touch the record held by the ’08/09 Nuggets, however… they posted an incredible 19. It looks like that mark may stand for quite a while, because the 2010/11 Clippers were a pretty goddamn high-flying team, and they didn’t even break it. Eric Gordon accepted the Team Poster Award on behalf of his Clippers…

Next up is the Shawn Bradley Award. We all know damn well that there’s two sides to every posterization, and I keep track of not only who’s throwing it down, but also who’s being thrown down on. Javale McGee got mashed on six times this season, one murking short of matching Chris Kaveman’s record set last season. However, McGee did finish second in the league in blocked shots, so give the man credit for successfully protecting the rack most of the time. Kaveman, on the other hand, was 23rd in blocked shots the year that he got teabagged seven times.

Lastly, we have the All StroShow Team. It’s a G/G/F/F/C squad of the five players who racked up the most POTDs. I will also be adding a sixth man to the All StroShow Team this year. And the 2010/11 All StroShow Team is…

G: JR Smith