Bam Adebayo Breaks The Concept Of Basketball, Scores 83 Points

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. And yet there is no timeline long enough that could have prepared me for Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points in an honest-to-goodness NBA game before I, personally, died.

So where were you when Adebayo scored 31 points in the first quarter of the Miami Heat's home game against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night? I was at my computer, playing Slay the Spire II and following the game on my phone when I got a couple of texts: "Bam is going crazy," one read. "Bam has 20 points in the first," read another. In what would become the theme of the night, the third just read: "What the fuck?" I tuned in just at the tail end of Adebayo's 31-point first, which was already historic and the fourth-highest quarter total in the last 30 years. I figured, with the Heat up 11 and the Wizards actively looking to lose, that Adebayo might score something like 40 points and then rest the whole fourth quarter. When the game went to half with him at 43 and the Heat up 76-62, I smiled and prepared myself for a boring second half that I would only sort of bother to watch. I was so fucking wrong.

Instead of resting Adebayo out of deference to the Heat's suddenly burgeoning hopes of avoiding the play-in round, Erik Spoelstra decided to say "fuck it, we ball." Screamed it, really, as he kept Adebayo in for almost the entirety of the second half. Keeping with that attitude, Adebayo realized at some point in the third quarter that his evening could amount to more than one insane half of basketball, if only he wanted it.

As it turned out, he really, really did. There was nothing ethical about what happened in the second half on Tuesday. Most Miami possessions were simple: Give the ball to Adebayo, who would either chuck up a three or drive into the paint in hope of getting fouled. The former strategy was ludicrous and flawed; Adebayo shot 22 three-pointers, by far his career-high, and only made seven. But the latter proved both surreal and highly effective.

While 83 will be the number that stands the test of time from this random Tuesday night game, 43 deserves a lot of shine as well. That's even putting aside that Adebayo shot the ball 43 times from the field, which ended up being a happy coincidence to go along with, and I'm sorry for yelling here, FORTY-THREE FREE-THROW ATTEMPTS. 4. 3. 43! That was a record, of course; even after having witnessed What Bam Did, the mind reels at the prospect of a game in which one player takes 44 free throws. (For the record, Dwight Howard had chucked up 39 attempts in two separate games.)

Also a record? Adebayo's 36 makes from the line, eight more than second-place Wilt Chamberlain and Adrian Dantley. Credit to Adebayo, who is a very good free throw shooter for a big man, for only missing seven, despite clearly being exhausted by the end of this laborious and extremely goofy odyssey into NBA history. It is true that the way he got to the line that much was through acts of violence against the concept of "good basketball," but that does nothing to diminish how well it all worked. Howard, for the record, made 46 of his 78 free throws over those two games; whatever points Adebayo loses for cynicism he surely made up in efficiency.

Some credit is due, too, to Erik Spoelstra, first for keeping Adebayo in the game and then for giving him the biggest and goofiest green light in NBA history. Spoelstra got so caught up in the moment that he did something that would, under normal circumstances, qualify as a dick move, but instead ended up as the funniest moment in a breathtakingly stupid game. With just under three minutes left in an extremely lopsided game, and Adebayo sitting on 77 points, Spoelstra challenged a charge call against his center, to raucous applause from the home crowd.

I have never wanted a video review to go Miami's way more, and I'm including the Max Strus three-pointer-that-wasn't in Game 7 of the 2022 Eastern Conference Finals there. The call was upheld as a charge, but it was awesome all the same. As a Heat fan, I have been lucky to see a lot of cool shit in my life: Three titles, 7 NBA Finals, Dwyane Wade's career, LeBron freaking James, Jimmy Butler in the bubble, Sad Bill Simmons, Peak Joel Anthony. But I have never been so enthralled by a Heat game as I was on Tuesday night.

It's not just that a Heat player now owns the second-highest scoring game of all time; it is not just the temptation to join the conspiracy theorists who believe Wilt's 100 game did not happen. It's that this place in the record book now belongs to Bam freakin' Adebayo.

I love Bam. He's a fantastic player who should have been recognized with at least one Defensive Player of the Year award by now. His offensive game has its moments, even if I want him to be more aggressive about getting to the hoop. But also, come on. There is no way that I, even in my wildest Heat-homer fever dreams, could have dreamed up that it would be Bam Adebayo that would knock Kobe Bryant's 81 down a place in the history books.

That Adebayo did it in such a shameful manner only makes it more gratifying, and made the otherwise hideous game something much more euphoric. It helped that this outburst came against a team so blatantly tanking. (Maybe this is the way the NBA fixes tanking; no one wants to be on the receiving end of an 80-piece from a player whose scoring average sits in the high teens.) I mean, the Heat at one point started intentionally fouling the Wizards just to get the ball back. It doesn't get much worse than that! Or much better, somehow.

Credit to the Wizards, who realized at some point that they did not want to be the team that allowed Bam Adebayo to score 80-plus points against them. Jeers to the Wizards for trying to avoid that outcome by intentionally fouling Keshad Johnson late in the fourth to keep the ball out of Adebayo's hands. Everything that followed was suitably shabby: Johnson tried to miss the free throw on purpose to force the ball back to Adebayo, but succeeded only in missing the free throw.

There was little in the game by then that resembled NBA basketball, or even a decently respectful/respectable pickup game. It was just one guy trying to do something extremely stupid and extremely cool, and so both the very pinnacle of what basketball can be and its absolute nadir. My only regret from Tuesday night is that Adebayo and the Heat as a whole didn't start playing these stupid games earlier. He absolutely could have gotten to 100 against whatever the Wizards were trying to do out there, and everyone involved would have deserved it in the worst possible ways.

Instead, after 42 minutes of chasing history, Adebayo got his 82nd and 83rd points from, of course, the free-throw line. Spoelstra finally took him out of the game with 1:16 left, which gave the crowd, which included both Adebayo's girlfriend A'ja Wilson and his mother, Marilyn Blount, a chance to celebrate.

I can't in good conscience say that this was a case of Adebayo getting hot and riding that shooting streak to victory and into history; he actually shot below his season percentage on Tuesday, although some of that was the result of him suddenly putting up threes at a Rasual Butlerian pace. The final result was exhilarating, and also wrong in many ways, and absolutely hilarious in all of them. Now, when anyone looks to see the highest point totals in an NBA game across league history—or until someone who actually can score at volume plays these Wizards—it will read "Wilt Chamberlain: 100 points," as it has for 64 years, and then be followed, somehow, by "Bam Adebayo: 83 points." It really happened.