It’s something that John Collins says he’s never been able to properly explain whenever he’s asked about it. It’s still a question that he loves to be asked even though he doesn’t have the answer.
How do you make dunking on someone’s head look so easy?
“Dunking on folks, I’ve been doing this my whole life,” Collins told The Athletic, after the Hawks’ 122-104 win over the Pistons. “It’s almost like a normality for me.”
There’s an art to posterizing an opponent, though. And John Collins is the modern day Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to the painting of a poster. The rim is his canvas, the ball is his brush.
The process of the painting starts with his hands. Collins consistently works on his hand strength when he’s in the weight room, which he says a lot of players around the NBA don’t take into consideration or think about.
“That’s why a lot of the times I’m able to catch and palm with one hand and catch it at a bunch of different angles because I can catch due to my strong hands, and I have incredible athleticism and the timing comes from years of understanding where the ball is let off from and the trajectory of where I am,” Collins said. “When you do it so many times, you are just able to figure it out.”
Collins says he only has about two seconds to fully analyze the pass, catch it and understand where the defender might be. The better the pass, the more time he has to time his jump correctly and refocus his eyes from the lob to the rim to finish the play.
