Since Bill Russell's arrival in the National Basketball Association in the mid-50s, the league has never lacked tall and powerful athletes, but the likes of Darryl Dawkins did not appear often on NBA courts. In his case, we are dealing with a harmonious combination of tall height, superhuman power, athleticism and speed in one body.
On the court, Darryl looked and moved not like a player with an official height of about 211 cm, but like an athletic “kid”, like Vinnie Johnson or Tim Hardaway. It was not difficult for Dawkins to rush across the court in a fast break, fly over the floor and smash the backboard, performing a monstrous slam dunk.
Killed backboards became a specialty of Dawkins (although he only destroyed two), who had many nicknames, most of them related to his passion for making jaw-dropping dunks: Chocolate Thunder, Dr. Dunk, Candy Slam, Master Dunker... Darryl dunked like he was taking revenge on basketball backboards for his lack of championship rings... In his 14 NBA seasons, he was in the finals three times with Philadelphia, played several games for Detroit in their first championship season (1988/89), but never achieved victory in the championship.
Unfortunately, the ideal athlete did not become the ideal basketball player. In the late 70s - early 80s, in the association's ranking of the 5th numbers, he was definitely among the top ten best centers, but approximately at the level of numbers 9-10. In his native Philadelphia, where he established himself as a player and spent his best years, Darryl shared playing time with Caldwell Jones. In only one season (1979/80) did he spend more than 30 minutes on the court on average per game. Dawkins never took part in an NBA All-Star game (although he should have made it to a couple of them because fans actively voted for him) and did not appear on the All-Star teams at the end of the regular season.