This morning, the NBA, Sprite and some “speed painter” dude named Dan Dunn combined forces to announce the contestants for this year’s Dunk Contest. By painting portraits of them. At a bus station. Located in the basement of Madison Square. I had to be in Midtown Manhattan today anyway, so I decided to stop by and see what all the fuss was about.

In all seriousness, it was actually a pretty original way to unveil the dunking reps, and even though the field isn’t particularly exciting (Shannon Brown, Gerald Wallace, Nate Robinson and whoever wins the dunk-off on February 12 between DeMar Derozan and Eric Gordan), you have to give the league and the sodamaker credit. As the MC of the event put it, the Dunk Contest’s “theme is creativity and artistry” and they did a good job trying to complement that with the impressive artistic skills of Dunn.

Shannon Brown was the first dunker portrait. As you can see above, we’re not exactly dealing with photo-realism here. Half the “fun” of the thing was supposedly allowing those in attendance to guess who the contestant was as Dunn was painting, and my first guess via Twitter was Fozzie Bear. But in like five minutes, he turned a mess of brown and purple into the portrait you see above, using only a few brushes, his hands and a spinning, 6′ x 6′, black canvas.

Next up was Gerald Wallace, which he just sketched much less impressively on a pad rather than paint. La di da. I would honestly rather see a 46-year-old Gerald Wilkins try to mimic his brother’s windmills.

Then came Nate Robinson — to the delight of no one.

I mean, the painting turned out decent even if it looked a little more like a mouth-breathing son of Rasheed Wallace than Nate, but we were told in the set up that it would “be someone you people will like.” First of all, “you people”? I think it’s time for a house meeting yall. And second of all, why would anyone in the world want to see Nate dunk publicly ever again. I like the dude more than most even, but unless he’s going to jump over Gheorghe Muresan on a unicycle this year, we’ve seen everything he’s capable of doing.

Obviously, we were in New York and Nate “plays for” the Knicks, so that’s what the MC meant. Meanwhile, we were right next to the Amtrak departure gates, so there weren’t really any Knicks fans there. I doubt there were many more two stories up inside MSG either now that I think about it, but still.

And more so than being disappointed about having to watch Nate Rob miss a bunch more dunks during All-Star Weekend, I was disappointed because — for a moment — I actually thought the MC was talking about LeBron. This was even reinforced when Dunn started off the portrait with some very prominent forehead creases reminiscent of Grandpa LeBron. Could it be? Will LeBron actually grace us with his presence?

Sure enough, however, no. No he will not.

LeBron’s obviously way too cool to come to an arena on a Friday Saturday night to dunk four times in his Cavs jersey and feels obligated to instead come to that very same building anyway and stand around clapping while wearing a cardigan and rocking sunglasses indoors. Thanks, dude. Seriously, it’s no problem at all. We’re all really excited to watch Gerald Wallace do some boring in-game-style dunks and then fall into the stanchion, per usual. Should be a hoot. We wouldn’t want you to break a sweat on an off-day or anything. We all care very much about how not winning might affect you brand and billionaire aspirations. Wouldn’t want to let entertaining millions of basketball fans get in the way of that.

I am by no means someone who has ever subscribed even for a moment to the gaining-momentum-by-the-day “LeBron Is a Douche” bandwagon. But when he does something like back out of his in-the-moment pledge to compete, I can at least start to see why many others think he is a big ol’ bag of douche.

And this transitions oh-so-conveniently into what was my favorite part of the event.

Right after Dunn finished with the last dunk participant painting, a 50-something-year-old lady and her two daughters walked up next to me. They were clearly enamored by all the commotion, and the mom wanted to know what was going on.

“Some guy is painting portraits of the NBA players who are going to compete in this year’s dunk contest,” I said.

“Oh,” she said peering around over the crowd very excitedly. “Those are really paintings?”

“Yeah. It was pretty impressive. He just did them in like 5 minutes.”

“He just painted them? In 5 minutes? The paintings? Of football players?”

” … Um … No. They’re basketball players. From the NBA. They do a dunk contest every year at the All-Star Game. And these are the guys who are going to be in it.”

“Oh. A dunk contest? Is it today? They do it in Penn Station?”

“No. It’s in February. In Dallas. On a basketball court. A lot of people were hoping LeBron James would be in it. But he won’t be.”

“LeBron? I know him! … Who are these boys?”

See, when it really comes down to it, the NBA is still somewhat of a niche sport. Most sports fans are well aware of Kobe, LeBron, Tim Duncan, Shaq, KG and Dwyane Wade. And some are even familiar enough with the league to realize that Chris Paul is one of the best players of all time or to know that Dwight Howard was made by James Cameron or perhaps to have even heard Danny Granger’s name before. But most people — with this lady being an extreme example — know very little beyond that.

So things like LeBron appearing in the dunk contest are still important. But apparently not to him.

Have no fear, however, hoops fans. We still get to watch Shannon Brown, Gerald Wallace, Nate Robinson and maybe even DeMar DeRozan prompt millions of people around to world to ask “who are these boys?”

Get pumped.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that the painter actually let it slip that it was rather hard preparing for this event because no one would tell him which players he would be painting until a week ago — and then the names changed a few times after that. I wanted to mention this for two reasons: (1) So any of you who wanna mock Dunn’s work will realize how difficult it has to be to paint giant, 6′ x 6′ portraits from memory of guys you probably aren’t particularly familiar with … and (Secondtively) to add some completely non-fact-based reasons for those of you who for some reason hate LeBron to speculate that one of the reasons that the names changed was because King James agreed and then backed out at the last minute. I actually sort of wanted to ask Dunn whether or not that happened and figured he might let it slip by accident, but he was talking into some cameras afterward, and I was sort of sick of standing around a train station. I’m so dedicated. My real guess is that Conan was originally slated to dunk, but Nate stole his spot last minute on the recommendation of Jay Leno.

Photo: Steve Freeman/NBAE via Getty Images