Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night. The Wizards spent a portion of the fourth quarter of the game selling out anything recognizable as a basketball principle in an effort to prevent Adebayo from breaking a scoring record. They sent panicked triple- and even quadruple-teams, they warped and broke their defensive shape to attempt exaggerated ball-denial schemes, and they finally resorted to intentionally fouling Adebayo's teammates. What they didn't do, because they couldn't, because as a team-building strategy it opposes their organizational goals, was put better players onto the floor. They simply do not have better players. They do not have combinations of players available to prevent a motivated opponent from scoring 83 points.
The version of basketball played by the Heat in order to facilitate Adebayo's record was like something out of a fever nightmare, but also: Miami won the game, and scored 150 points, and beat the Wizards by 21. This was accomplished—the second-most points the Heat have scored in a regular-season game in their history—despite all but a couple of Miami's starting-grade players missing the game due to injuries and rest. Looking at their lineups, it's hard to know where shots were supposed to come from, if not from Adebayo.
After the game, Wizards head coach Brian Keefe was begrudging in his assessment of Adebayo's performance. "You've got to give him credit in the first half, he shot the ball terrific, he scored the ball really well," said an affectless, dead-eyed Keefe, a placeholder non-entity who has the unbearably miserable job of keeping a bunch of mismatched bozos motivated for several more weeks of this shit without even the slightest remote chance of any tangible reward. "He came out and had a little bit in the third, too, but they obviously kept him in the game and there were a lot of fouls called, you know, 16 free throws in the fourth quarter. Just trying to take the ball out of his hands, he still got some free throws 40 feet from the rim. I can't explain some of those calls. That's all I've got to say on that."
I feel just the slightest bloom of warmth in my black heart for Keefe, for the effort he made to frame what happened in this game in basketball terms. That guy was scoring a lot, and we tried to stop him, but the dang refs sure called a lot of fouls. For a viewer, it did not feel like this. It felt like the Heat had stopped performing basketball, had abandoned the normal incentives of a regular-season contest and begun pursuing something basically orthogonal, and the Wizards took umbrage and assigned themselves a righteous duty to oppose its accomplishment. That made it extremely funny, but also ridiculous, sort of cursed and indecent. I like to think of a dipshit substitute-teacher-ass head coach over there convincing himself that what is being waged out there on the floor is, in fact, hoops, the basic quest to outscore an opponent and win a game. The fool! The poor deluded fool. Come in for a hug, little guy.
What inevitably snuffs that warmth—or at least replaces it with a different kind of warmth, the sad tender warmth felt for someone who is forced to dig their own grave—is the knowledge that it is in fact the Wizards who are off on a tangent, spoiling the hoops so that they can take some other prize, one that is in conflict with the purported point of arranging these damned contests. Disgustingly, Keefe's bosses have made him into a hypocrite, expressing umbrage about the degradation of a single basketball game when his franchise has already degraded 63 of them just this season, and hundreds more stretching back years. Why are the Heat the ones responsible for upholding competitive integrity, BRIAN? What, for that matter, the hell are the Heat supposed to do when their comparatively dead-serious basketball operation is assigned to fill 48 minutes of action on a court with circus clowns?
"The fourth quarter just turned into not a basketball game," groused Keefe, not incorrectly but with all the gravity and moral authority of Artful Dodger. What makes it a real basketball game, my friend, is not where precisely the players are standing when they throw the ball toward the basket, nor is it who precisely is doing the throwing. What makes it a real basketball game, and not cynical, farcical, kayfabe'd basketball-like choreography, is that both teams are out there trying to fucking win. Reserve your indignation, I beg you, for those rare instances when your abomination of an organization is the one of the two upholding the very most basic structure of athletic competition.
The reason to have good basketball players on your team, when you are playing basketball against another team, is so that you can compete well and try to win. Why do you want to win? Well, apart from it being the point of athletic competition, success feels better than frustration. Sometimes there are good feelings in a losing effort, and sometimes there are bad feelings amid a victory, but on balance you are more likely to encounter the bad feelings of competition when you are losing. The more brutally you are losing, the likelier you are to feel like shit. The Wizards deserve to lose brutally and to feel like absolute hell about it. I hope the NBA's good teams spend the remaining weeks of this compromised season sending Adebayo down the list of all-time scorers. The Wizards play in Orlando on Thursday: Why shouldn't Paolo Banchero shoot for 90? If only the Magic are trying to win, why should it be any of Keefe's business how they go about it?
