As the turn of a new decade approaches, we look back at the 10 biggest NBA moments in the last 10 years
It may be hard to believe but 2020 is less than two months away. This decade seems to have truly blown by and part of that may be because time flies when you’re having fun. This decade of basketball was surely fun as we saw some of the game’s all-time greats retire and have epic performances as legends, legendary championship moments and shots (including arguably the greatest shot in NBA history) and trends such as player-empowerment in free agency and the rise of 3-point shooting that has changed the game forever.
Ten years is a great barometer for measuring how culture changes and what certain trends are as well as who the predominant players were both in life and basketball. This decade was truly incredible, meaning there were many more than 10 great moments and it is impossible to include everything.
This includes the Lob-City era of the LA Clippers (created by the NBA commissioner at the time, David Stern, nixing a Chris Paul trade to the Los Angeles Lakers for, “basketball reasons,” which really meant Kobe and the Lakers had too many championships so he wanted to see other teams win), which is referred to as the lob city era because all-time great point guard Chris Paul threw up lob passes for alley-oop slam dunks by Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan.
This also featured Blake Griffin jumping over a car in the 2011 dunk contest.
This also includes Giannis Antetokounmpo’s MVP campaign from him having to sell trinkets in Greece to survive as young kid to becoming the first Greek player to winning MVP, to Carmelo Anthony scoring 62 points in a game (the record at the historic Madison Square Garden), Klay Thompson scoring 37 points in a quarter (most ever in one quarter) and James Harden just finishing this campaign by having the highest scoring average since Michael Jordan averaged 37.1 points a game in the 1986-87 season.
As a new decade approaches, here are the top 10 moments of the last 10 years.