Bam Adebayo just scored 83 points in a game. Was it down to brilliance or stat padding? | Miami Heat
Second in points, last in ethics?
That will be the accusation leveled against the Miami Heat and Bam Adebayo, after the big man became second on the NBA’s single-game scoring list with 83 points against the woeful Washington Wizards on Tuesday. Adebayo surpassed Kobe Bryant’s 81 points scored in a 2006 game and left only Wilt Chamberlain, with 100 in a game in 1962, ahead of him on the all-time list.
The Heat won, 150-129, and basketball observers quickly turned their attention to the most skeptical and cynical line of questioning possible: Was Adebayo’s success tainted by the Heat’s decision to build its game plan around allowing him to fill the stat sheet as much as possible in a long-decided contest? On the recording sheet, the answer will be no. But as most NBA people know well, the stat line ranks far behind fans’ perceptions of players and their accomplishments. And how the Heat helped Adebayo get to 83 will be under the microscope for a long time.
On one hand: Anyone who disputes the fact that Adebayo scored 83 points — more than the entire Milwaukee Bucks team managed in a game earlier this month — is a pedantic loser. This league organizes 1,230 regular season games each year. Among beginner players alone, that equates to 12,300 individual games per year. Exactly one of those opportunities, in all of NBA history, yielded more points than Adebayo put up for the Wizards on Tuesday. Objectively, there is no “cheap” way to do something that no player other than Wilt has ever done.
Additionally, Adebayo’s 43 field goal attempts aren’t a major exception. Chamberlain made a hilarious 63 shots in his 100 points, Bryant 46 on the night he scored 81. Adebayo was busy in other ways, too; he pulled down a game-high nine rebounds, including eight on defense in his 42 minutes, the most of any player on the court. It’s not like the 28-year-old is slacking off on the other end.
On the other hand, what would sport be like if we couldn’t spend time and energy tearing down players during their greatest achievements? Where Adebayo’s play reaches the theater of the absurd is at the foul line. The previous record for free throw attempts in an NBA game was 39, reached twice by Dwight Howard during the “Hack-a-Howard” era in 2012 and 2013. Teams knew Howard wouldn’t make many more than six out of 10 free throws, and they felt good sending him out on the court to make 21 and 25 of his 39 shots on those respective nights. Adebayo breaks a new record 43 free throws on Tuesday and, to his credit, made 36. There’s nothing dishonorable about taking advantage of his opportunities.
Or maybe it is, when a player’s team turns the latter stages of the game into a joke whose sole purpose is to drive up a player’s numbers at the foul line. In the fourth quarter, Adebayo was 3 of 8 from the field and 1 of 6 from the three-point line. But the Heat continued to feed him and the Wizards continued to foul him to send him to the line. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Miami, leading by nearly 30 points in the final minutes, repeatedly fouled the Wizards to speed up their possessions and get the ball back. Adebayo made 14 of 16 foul shots in the final 12 minutes.
Even that doesn’t fully explain how ridiculous Miami’s effort to get Adebayo to 83 was. The Heat simply gave the ball to Adebayo and made him run full steam toward the Washington basket, taking low-percentage shots that may or may not lead to a foul. In just the last five minutes of a game long over, Adebayo went 1 of 5 from the field and 7 of 7 from the foul line, his final points coming at the line with 1:16 left to extend the lead to 150-126. You have to watch the video for yourself to understand how uninterested the Heat were in playing anything resembling a regular “offense.” The end of this match was pure stat sheet stuffing, which paid off when Adebayo nailed his 42nd and 43rd attempts to score. Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra had the decency to sub Adebayo eight seconds later, the big guy having passed Bryant on the scoring list. It wasn’t much different from a 10-year-old video gamer trying to pull off a screaming total against the CPU after school.
None of this is to say that Adebayo’s night wasn’t extraordinary. Eighty-three is the highest point total in the league’s three-point era (since 1979), and for a front area player to get there is truly out of this world. Only Joel Embiid in 2024 and David Robinson in 1994 had even gotten to 70 among big men in that span, and neither of them had managed 71. Adebayo — a very good player rather than a great — had a good enough game that historians can’t ignore him. But the way it got into the record books means the haters will keep hating. Maybe he’ll go for 84 one day.
