The story begins with our main character, Hanamichi Sakuragi gets rejected for the 50th time in middle school. From hence on, he develops an intense dislike and a heightened sensitivity to any phrase that sounds remotely like basketball, because the last girl who rejected him has her sight on a basketball player.

And thus Sakuragi enters Shohoku High School, where he meets Haruko Akagi, who captured his attention by asking … (Chibi Haruko: Excuse me, do you like basketball?) and his heart at his first sight of her. Due to her, he developed an interest in basketball overnight. Unfortunately for him, she has a huge crush on the school’s new basketball star, Kaede Rukawa, who also happens to be the new heartthrob of the school. He, however, has no interest in anything except sleeping and basketball. When Sakuragi finds out, he was upset and in a moment of fury, he unwittingly offended the captain of the basketball team, Takenori Akagi, who also happens to be Haruko’s sister. After winning a one-on-one with unique rules, Sakuragi decided to work hard on winning Haruko’s heart by joining basketball and beating Rukawa in basketball.

After much gentle and not-so gentle persuasion tactics, Akagi, whom Sakuragi nicknames Gori, allows him to join the basketball team, but start learning from basics. This is where he meets other members of the team, more importantly Kogure, the vice-captain, Ayako the mangeresss and Anzai the coach.

The first match Sakuragi plays in is against Ryonan High School. Here we meet Jun Uzomi, the Ryonan coach and Akira Sendoh, the star of Ryonan basketball team. After fighting very hard against Ryonan, they lost too Ryonan by only one point.

After that marks the return of Shohoku’s point guard, Ryota Miyagi, who had been hospitalized after a fight with some year 3s in the school. The small but extremely agile and fast point guard is also VERY infatuated with Ayako, having joined the basketball team for her sake. But not long after his return, the year 3s that he had fought with returned for revenge, this time, even trying to spoil the basketball team’s chances in the regional competition by provoking them into fighting, thus getting banned. It turns out that one of the ‘gangsters’ was actually from the basketball team and was a MVP in his middle school days. After some fights and truths tumbling out, he broke down and confessed to wanting to play basketball again.

And thus Shohoku basketball team is now made up of Akagi (c), Rukawa (sf), Sakuragi, (pf), Miyagi (pg) and Mitsui (sg) (He’s a three point shooter). And they made their way through the regional competition, meeting Shoyo High School (Kenji Fujima and Toru Hanagata), winning the seeded school by 2 marks. They then proceeded into the quarterfinals, with Kainan (Maki, Jin and Kiyota), Ryonan and Takezato. They first played against Kainan and lost by 2 points, partly due to a mistake in passing by Sakuragi. Ryonan, in the meantime, won Takezato. The next round had Shohoku winning Takezato, even though the main players were not all fielded while Ryonan lost to Kainan. In the last and final round, Kainan won Takezato easily while Ryonan and Shohoku fought for the second position. The final score was 70 to 66, in favor of Shohoku. And thus Shohoku entered the national competition, together with Kainan as Kanagawa’s representatives.

At the nationals, they first meet Toyotama, whom they won and proceeded to the next round where they meet Sannoh, the long reigning champion of high school basketball. In that match itself, all the players learnt something valuable and rallied together to pull one of the greatest miracles in basketball history. From a point where they were 20 points down, they continued fighting back, point for point, until in the last few seconds, Rukawa and Sakuragi, who are enemies, cooperated to allow Shohoku to win by one mere point.

However, Shohoku didn’t win the nationals. Due to their physical tiredness and Sakuragi’s injury, which he picked up during the Sannoh match, they lost the next match and thus they were out of the competition.

The manga ends soon, after giving the readers a few more facts. Such as the other Kanagawa representative Kainan placed second in the nationals, Akagi and Kogure leaving the team to study which meant that the captain is Miyagi, Rukawa was called up for national youth team, Haruko becoming another manageress in addition to Ayako and Sakuragi being in rehab for his injury.

And thus we are all waiting for SlamDunk Two to come out. According to various reports, Inoue-san has reportedly said that it will come out, even though it has been more than 5 years.