Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in an NBA game on Tuesday. I’m going to repeat that because it’s not quite computing for a certain segment of the Internet. Bam Adebayo scored 83 points in an NBA game on Tuesday. This is, by any definition, one of the most incredible single-game occurrences in NBA history. Michael Jordan never scored 83 points in an NBA game. LeBron James never scored 83 points in an NBA game. The person who scored 83 points in the second-highest scoring game in NBA history entered Tuesday’s showdown with the Washington Wizards with a prior career high of 41. He doubled his career-high in a single night!
This should be a celebration. A homegrown and often under-appreciated star in the middle of an up-and-down season lifts his shorthanded Miami Heat team into the history books. This is sports movie stuff. But sports movies are mostly gone. They went extinct right around the birth of social media, and what do people do best in the social media era?
Complain.
“This is a disgrace to Kobe’s 81,” said one viral tweet, nearing 9,000 likes as of this writing. “Mickey Mouse 81,” someone texted me after Adebayo tied Bryant. Los Angeles Lakers public address announcer Lawrence Tanter announced Adebayo’s 83-point explosion as “a melancholy footnote in NBA history” while the Lakers hosted the Minnesota Timberwolves Tuesday night.
Bam Adebayo’s 83 points by the numbers: Putting Heat star’s record-setting scoring night in perspective
Brad Botkin
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here slack-jawed because, and I’m sorry for repeating myself, someone scored 83 points in an NBA game! This is history! It’s one of the most incredible things you will ever see on a basketball court! So, what are people complaining about? Let’s dive in.
“It was all free throws.”
Yes, Adebayo set NBA records with 36 made free throws and 43 attempts. Entering Tuesday, Adrian Dantley held the NBA record with 28 free throws in a game. That means Adebayo got eight more points at the line than the prior record-holders. One of them was Wilt Chamberlain. Nobody brings up the record number of free throws he scored in his 100-point game. The other was Dantley, who scored 46 points in that game. Eight free throws weren’t closing that gap. There were seven games in NBA history before Adebayo’s in which a player made 25 free throws. The highest scorer in any of them, aside from Chamberlain, was Michael Jordan with 58 points. If Adebayo had just tied the previous record, he would have ended up at 75 points and gone from the second-highest scoring game in NBA history to the fourth.
“It came against the Wizards.”
Even Houston Rockets coach Ime Udoka acknowledged that last point as an explanation for what happened. Yes, the Wizards are bad. These sorts of games tend to happen against bad teams. Chamberlain scored 100 against the 29-51 New York Knicks. Bryant scored 81 against a Toronto Raptors team that went 27-55. Chamberlain and Devin Booker are the only players ever to score 70 points against a team that finished the season with a winning record. There are other bad teams. Nobody scored 80 points against the even more inept Brooklyn Nets this week. Everyone else in the league got their crack at the Wizards this season. The previous high against them was Donovan Mitchell’s 48.
“It was all garbage time.”
Adebayo had the fifth-highest scoring quarter in the last 30 years of NBA history on Tuesday. It came in the first quarter, when he scored 31 points. He had a career-high 43 at halftime, and 63 after three quarters (symbolically appropriate since, in another famous game, Bryant reached 63 through three quarters against the Dallas Mavericks and sat out the fourth) to break James’ single-game Heat franchise record (61). Adebayo attempted eight field goals and 16 free throws in the fourth quarter on Tuesday. Kobe Bryant took 13 field goals and 12 free throws in the fourth quarter of his 81-point game. Bryant was the only Laker to score in the last seven minutes of that game. His last 17 points all came in the final five-and-a-half minutes with a double-digit lead. That game was more closely-contested than this one, but let’s not pretend there wasn’t some stat-padding in that game, too.
“It doesn’t mean anything because anybody can score in this era.”
So where were all of the other 80-point games this season? How about the 70s? Is there a lone 60 out there? Nope. The season-high this year was 56, by Nikola Jokić, and it came in an overtime game. Chamberlain scored 100 points in the 1961-62 season. At that point in league history, teams averaged just under 108 field goal attempts per game. This season, that average is around 89. The Heat are the fastest team in the NBA, but the pace back then made basketball an entirely different sport. If Adebayo had era help, so did Chamberlain.
“He was so inefficient, he missed more shots than he made!”
I’ll admit it’s a little funny watching Bryant fans turn into the efficiency police since he’s, you know, the guy who once took 60 shots in a game. I’d just ask who else should have shot the ball for Miami? Tyler Herro, Andrew Wiggins, Norman Powell, Kel’El Ware and Nikola Jović all sat out Tuesday. There wasn’t exactly anyone else for Washington’s defense to key in on. It was always going to be a high-usage and probably somewhat inefficient night. He just scaled the volume up to a historic level. Did the Heat force-feed him at the end? Yes. Of course they did. They had a chance at NBA history and they went for it.
Kobe’s night may have been better, but don’t knock Bam
Look, we can be honest about this: Bryant’s 81-point game was probably a bit more impressive than Adebayo’s 83. It was more efficient. It came in a more competitive game against a slightly more serious opponent, and more pertinently, it came at a point in NBA history that was much less friendly to scorers. Though the league had opened the game up by eliminating hand-checking by 2006, it hadn’t totally figured out how to take advantage of that to generate really efficient offenses yet. The 3-point revolution was still in its infancy, and an average offense scored just 106.2 points per 100 possessions at that point. We’re at 115.3 this season. If you’re a Bryant fan trying to preserve the legacy of your favorite player, I suppose you can take some solace in this. As great as Adebayo was against the Wizards, Bryant’s night against the Raptors was still better.
But there’s no reason to knock down one player to prop up another. This notion that Adebayo had some sort of unethical 83-point game that should be dismissed in favor of Bryant’s or wasn’t a worthy piece of NBA history is patently ridiculous. If you could game the system into an 83-point game, someone would have done it by now. All of the best scorers this season have gotten their crack at the Wizards. All of the best scorers in NBA history have played against bad teams and had chances to inflate their stats in garbage time.
What happened for Adebayo was something of a perfect storm. A great player faced a terrible team without many of his best offensive teammates and got very hot early. The game stayed close enough for his coach to keep playing him deep into the second half, and by the time resting him was a realistic option, history was already in reach. Maybe those circumstances aren’t common, but it’s not as though they’re totally unheard of. Frankly, it’s not dissimilar to what happened for Bryant or Chamberlain, or what happens for basically anyone that crosses the 70-point threshold.
Have you ever wondered why there are only five 50-point games in NBA Finals history? It’s because basically nobody scores 50 under truly adverse conditions. When the opponent is great, when the stakes are highest, when the intensity peaks, it just isn’t possible to push for 70 or 80 points. From that perspective, basically any 70-plus-point game is a little fake. It’s only ever going to happen against bad teams during the regular season dog days with some garbage-time stat-padding and a loose whistle. Again, if you want to say Bryant’s game was a bit more impressive, fine. But let’s not pretend he scored 81 points against the 2004 Detroit Pistons. He did it against a washed Jalen Rose and a coach who refused to double him.
And you know what? It’s still incredible. Anyone scoring 80 or more points in an NBA game is going to be incredible. This doesn’t have to be complicated. This isn’t some big-picture statement about Bryant’s or Adebayo’s places in history. It was a random, fun little anomaly that we should be able to enjoy without all of this nitpicking.
