So Vince asked Buddy's owner and "amazing trainer" Kevin Di Cicco to bring this rising canine star by his office for a live demonstration. "They put up a regulation-size basketball hoop out in our parking lot here in Malibu," he recalls, "and I walked down there and [Di Cicco] showed me the basketball that Buddy was hitting, you know, putting in—it was a regulation basketball, [the] same one the NBA players were using, and he told me that Buddy had a better 3-point average than Shaq does by a long shot. I'm like, 'Oh, really? OK,' and then he proceeded out in our parking lot—and this whole crowd started gathering—to sink, from all sorts of different angles without the ball being served up perfectly every time, basket after basket after basket—[and] with full awareness.

"It wasn't like [Buddy] was just hitting [the ball] and hoping it went in," Vince adds. "He was looking at the basket. It was weird…I remember after that I said, 'I can't believe what I just witnessed here.' I just couldn't believe it—and…that was actually the moment that we did the deal with the writers Paul [Tamasy] and Aaron [Mendelsohn] and also with Kevin [Buddy's trainer]."