Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acronym the post-AI generation will have to grapple with, or just an ayahuasca-fueled fever dream. Anyway, the supposed factual record is implausible—nobody gets to shoot 43 free throws, and nobody has 31 in the first quarter, and for sure no team would actually put out a lineup quite as bereft as the Washington Wizards did last night. Maybe people in the future will think this because the NBA fixes tanking for good in three months and teams being purposely abject for draft lottery purposes fades into feeling like a hallucination that never actually happened. Maybe people in the future will think this just because they are people.
Hey, some people currently think that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points because there isn't film to prove it, and Adebayo's game was only on NBA League Pass and in a couple of local media markets, which is the modern version of the same thing. But maybe the easiest way to deny it will be because, well, Bam Adebayo had 83 points? That cannot possibly be, and so by fiat or just through the sort of attrition that applies to things like this, it didn't. Tinfoil hats don't make themselves, but they are built for comfort.
But for all the teethwringing and gnashing of hands over Adebayo's performance as it was, it was exactly as normal and forgettable as other mega-games. It came against a remarkably bad team, but so did Chamberlain's (real) century and so did Kobe Bryant's 81 and so did almost all the other 70-plus point performances in league history. Adebayo got a ridiculous 43 free throws, which is a league record, yes, but one that is never cited as any kind of actual achievement in any other context, unless you count the fact that most of the other high-free throw guys were deliberately fouled because they couldn't shoot free throws. He scored more than half his team's points, which is supposed to be really selfish to the point of being unethical, but also do you know who else did that in a game? Willie Burton and Michael Redd.
None of those are really the issue here, though. Like every other historical fact, Adebayo's accomplishment will eventually be disputed because that's what people do with facts. Even before every news story was ritualistically dipped in the acid bath of algorithmic reality distortion, concrete things become abstract over time as partisan or contrarian or just obnoxious instinct overtakes reality. What clearly happened picks up a counter-claim that actually it didn't, and then the work is to look for someone who would benefit by saying that it had. The religious order of Kobestans is already out in force, claiming that Adebayo committed a crime against history by even getting those last two free throws or the 14 before that just counting the fourth quarter, and crimes against history eventually become a notion that it wasn't history at all.
Moreover, there's an excellent chance that someone else will get 84, and soon. It's not like Adebayo is an offensive outlier here; he's a fine player, but the main criticism of his otherwise impressive all-around game is that he isn't assertive enough, and a case can be made that his is the least noteworthy offensive resume of any of the 40 NBA players to have scored even 60 in a game. That ought to be enough in itself for some future squeaker to invalidate his accomplishment if he's in the mood to do so. Even if you're not fully denying the obvious, you can construct a perfectly reasonable argument for why you're choosing to dismiss the accomplishment. This distance between that and eventually denying it completely can be crossed in time.
And the low thrill of refusing to acknowledge that something you don't like ever happened is the thing, here. It's why the Chamberlain C-note arguments have always been so irksome in the three-dimensional world; even the "he was just playing against plumbers and bricklayers" one, which is very easily attached to the 1962 Knicks team he hung those 100 points against. And in their defense, and in contrast to last night's Wizards, the 1962 Knicks weren't being prevented from winning by management fiat. They were just organically terrible.
But never mind all that. Whatever reason there is to decry Bam Adebayo as an unworthy holder of a record that actually isn't a record could eventually be beaten into an argument to deny it outright. In a decade or so, if current subjectivity trends continue, it will be an easy shift to, "it never happened." That ease is predicated on the person making the argument caring more about being comfortable than being correct, but the trend lines there are decently clear, as well. Anyone who feels the need to dismiss the validity of Bam Adebayo going for for almost 12 dozen last night needs to look within, but also will only need to wait a little bit. Eventually nobody will trust that anything ever happened, because that's who we have decided to be. Bam Adebayo? Eventually, we never heard of him.
