Emotions were not actually that easy to settle.
Aaron Gordon was not Chen Xi, after all.
Chen had seen too many honors and won too many trophies. To him, the Slam Dunk Contest title was really just an optional addition to his collection.
At that moment, Chen Xi's attitude was essentially, If I win it, I'm lucky. If I don't, that's fate.
Winning the dunk crown would naturally be ideal, but even if he did not, leaving behind such a classic round of competition would be satisfying enough.
With my skills, I can always enter again next season, or the season after that~~
It's just a dunk crown. How hard could it be to win?
But for Gordon, it felt as though he had returned to 2016, to that night when he had faced the pressure of going up against LaVine.
In fact, the pressure Chen Xi exerted now was even greater than LaVine's had been.
Back then, LaVine had run out of moves toward the end, too. He could only keep tweaking the details of his free-throw-line dunks to earn points.
But with Chen Xi now, who knew what absurd move he might pull out next?
That air of effortless confidence was a real headache.
He had casually completed several extremely difficult dunks in succession. Aside from the accidental three-pointer he had made by being "too accurate," Chen Xi had not even failed a single attempt.
That spoke to his terrifying depth of ability, with plenty more still waiting to be unearthed.
The unknown was not enough to frighten Gordon, but the enormous pressure inevitably weighed on him.
Fortunately, Aaron Gordon was an exceptionally skilled player with nerves of steel himself.
In life, some people lost their composure under intense pressure, and their control over their bodies deteriorated.
Others,