Mob extend unbeaten SlamBall start to eight games, stay on top

Four wins in one week pushed the Mob to 8-0 and left them alone at the top of SlamBall’s rankings for a second straight week. They did it the hard way for everyone else, winning twice by 13 points on July 27 and then stacking two more victories by even larger margins.

That kind of run does more than pad a record in SlamBall. It tells the rest of the league that the Mob were controlling possessions, winning the aerial collisions and making the game play at their pace. In a sport built on short bursts, rebound chaos and trampoline-assisted finishes, repeated double-digit wins are the clearest sign a team has figured out the details faster than the field.

The best proof came from the box scores that followed. A league recap showed the Mob beating the Slashers 72-51 and Buzzsaw 50-31 on Sunday to improve to 4-0 at that point, with gunner Darius Clark piling up 83 points over the weekend. Clark was the kind of scorer who bent the whole weekend around him, the sort of name that gives the Mob an edge because every opponent has to account for him before the ball even goes in the air.

Buzzsaw was the closest thing to a tactical answer on paper, especially when the league later set up Week 3 as a showdown between the unbeaten Mob and the surging Buzzsaw at Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas. But the matchup only underlined the gap. The Mob were already the league’s only undefeated team, and the rest of the bracket had to chase them in real time rather than wait for the standings to even out.

That was no fluke either. The Mob finished the 2023 regular season 16-0 and then ran through the postseason, beating the Lava 49-36 in the semifinals and the Slashers 72-42 in the championship game before a sold-out crowd at Cox Pavilion. The league called that the first undefeated championship in SlamBall history, which is what made the early rankings story feel less like a snapshot and more like the beginning of a coronation.

The Mob have lived in the league’s spotlight before, winning titles in 2012 and 2016 in China, and Brendan Kirsch was back on the sideline as head coach after guiding the team during SlamBall’s first four seasons, including the 2012 title year. With Clark scoring in bunches and the Mob blowing past opponents by double digits, they were not just first in the rankings. They were becoming the standard everyone else had to solve.