CHARLOTTE — John Collins opened his yellow box of Bojangles’ chicken and sighed. It was another disappointment, not even 24 hours after one of the most frustrating nights in his young career.



There was no ranch dressing in the bag. He would have to eat his chicken with no sauce.



Sitting in the third row of a black shuttle bus, Collins wondered out loud what he could have done differently about his Saturday night in the NBA’s slam dunk contest. Should he have switched the order of his dunks? Should he have engaged the crowd before his first dunk to get the fans involved? These were the thoughts running through Collins’ mind as he lied in his bed at the Le Méridien hotel hours after his performance in the dunk contest was skewered on social media.



Collins scrolled through Twitter and Instagram into the late hours of the night searching for some reassurance that his two dunks weren’t a total failure. Instead, he saw his...