The whole outline about this anime is actually pretty easy to get, no mind twisting plots, confusing characters, all of it is just pretty modern day stuff. The story is about the journey of one of the worst High School basketball teams in Japan as it climbs to the top through laughter, sweat, and tears. It is base on the personal and sporting life of protagonist, red-headed Sakuragi Hanamichi, A natural athlete who doesn't know anything but beating up other gangs. For the sake of one girl's affection, he has done something totally foolish and gotten himself in trouble. And thus, the series interchanges between being a total comedy, as when Sakuragi' s friends celebrates Sakuragi's being dumped by the 50th girl, and being a very tense sports drama that deals with honor and dreams.

The main theme of Slam Dunk is obviously basketball. The story begins with the main character, Sakuragi Hanamichi 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.

Hanamichi enters Shohoku High School and once again, falls in love with Haruko Akagi, the sister of the captain of Shohoku basketball team, Takenori Akagi. He soon realizes that the way to Haruko's heart is through basketball, and thus decides to join the school basketball team, which is captained by Akagi, Haruko's older brother.

Sakuragi tries very hard to get on the good side of Akagi and soon is accepted into the team. However, his skills weren't great, as he didn't really know anything about basketball and had to start right from the beginning. Luckily for him, Sakuragi is a very fast learner and can soon play quite well as a Power Forward.

But it wasn't quite so easy to get Haruko. Unfortunately for Sakuragi, she has a huge crush on the school's new basketball star, very talented, cold and good-looking player called 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. 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.

The team starts to get bigger and better also when our defense starts coming in. This small but fast defense player is called Ryota Miyagi. He too joined the team because of a girl, team manager Ayako. From there, we also have our MVP (Most Valuable PLayer) who is Hisashi Mitsui. Mitsui's three pointers are what make him most valuable in the games.

The story goes on to show basketball games between a lot of the schools in Kanagawa, the place they live in in Japan. There are three other main teams apart from Shohoku, they are Kainan, Ryonan and Shoyo.

Kainan is considered to be the strongest team in Kanagawa, captained by Maki, also including Jin and Kiyota. Ryonan is captained by Uozumi and includes Akira Sendoh and Koshino. Shoyo is coached and captained by Kenji Fujima, also includes Toru Hanagata.

Much later, the teams meet up for competition against Shoyo, Ryonan, and Kainan. Although a tough fight, Shohoku still lost to Kainan but beat the other three to be the second top school in Kanagawa.

Then, it's the IH competition. Hanamichi trains really hard and even manages to get new shoes while on a "date" with Haruko! And although the team trained hard, Hanamichi was struck down by a severe back condition while battling out with the so called "Ace" school in basketball, Sannoh during the last few series of the manga. Anyway, they did manage to beat Sannoh by a small margin but after that, did not manage to make it to the finals. From there, Mr. Inoue keeps us in suspense as he draws Hanamichi in Rehab, Miyagi as the captain of Shohoku now, Rukawa in Japan's International team and Haruko as the second team manager of the team.

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