Miami Heat big man Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards on Tuesday, the second-highest single-game total in NBA history behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 100. In the aftermath, plenty of people have lined up to scream about how it went down.
There were some shenanigans on the Heat’s part, for sure. They intentionally fouled with a huge lead to extend the game and give Adebayo more possessions to chase fouls and intentionally missed their own free throw to get the ball back as Adebayo hoisted shot after shot, at one point flailing his leg out damn near a full 90 degrees in search of contact.
With 1:35 remaining, Adebayo was at 81 points. You could see the Heat coaches instructing their players to foul, and the presumption was this was where Adebayo would exit, leaving him tied with the late Kobe Bryant for the modern single-game record. But that’s not what happened. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra left Adebayo in with a 27-point lead to hunt two more free throws, bringing his total charity attempts for the game to an NBA record 43 and ultimately taking him to his 83-point total before he finally exited after his 35th and 36th free throws of the night.
Despite the widespread criticism, Spoelstra told reporters before Miami’s game vs. the Milwaukee Bucks on Thursday that he has no regrets about how he handled things.
“I apologize to absolutely no one, period,” Spoelstra said.
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Wizards coach Brian Keefe described the whole fourth quarter as “not a real basketball game,” and it wasn’t. The only reason those 12 minutes were played was to pad Adebayo’s stats. CBS Sports’ Jack Maloney called all the shameless tactics an “affront to the game.” The Athletic’s Sam Amick reported that he spoke with “some of the people from [Kobe] Bryant’s past” who were not pleased with the way Abebayo was left in the game to purposefully pass Bryant’s mark, to say nothing of the manner in which Abebayo got to that point in the first place.
It begs the question: If Spoelstra had it to do over again, would he do anything differently? With the benefit of hindsight and perhaps some consideration for the criticism, does he feel any sort of regret for, say, not taking Adebayo out of the game earlier? Absolutely not.
“I’m not losing any sleep on what people are saying. … I would do it 10 times out of 10 again,” Spoelstra said.
Spoelstra said Adebayo approached the game “appropriately” from the outset, and that can’t be disputed. He had 31 points in the first quarter. It’s easy to fall into trap games against tanking teams like the Wizards, and the Heat are playing for something. They’re up to No. 6 in the East standings. Adebayo set the tone early and kept it going all night, obviously.
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When Adebayo passed LeBron James‘ all-time Heat record of 61 points at the end of the third quarter, it was universally celebrated. It was everything that came after that point that many people took issue with. But again, Spoelstra doesn’t care about those people, many of whom he believes “didn’t even watch the game.” (In fairness, Amick literally admitted in his column that he didn’t watch more than the last few minutes).
“As a staff, we did watch the fourth quarter again to see how it played out because of all the noise,” Spoelstra said. “The going back and forth, all that happened under two minutes. He was already 76 deep. And damn right we’re going to go for [the record] at that point.”
In other words, who cares about how the last handful of points were scored? At that point, you’re giving the fans what they paid to see, and personally, I agree with that. I do see the other side, but this is a business based on entertainment, and in the end, nobody is ever going to forget the night Adebayo scored 83. Maybe some will remember it for the way he got 83, but either way, we’ll all remember.
And for that, Spoelstra has no regrets nor any concern whatsoever for the critics.
“I’ve seen people say you’ve got to be a purist,” Spoelstra said. “I’m a Darwinist in this league. You can do anything you want in this game. You can approach it however you want. We get criticized for what we do. There’s probably irony in these two organizations [the Wizards and Heat]. There’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing. If you can tank and get a great draft pick, I don’t care. You can do anything you want in this league. … We don’t do that.”
Another great point by Spoelstra. It’s pretty rich for the coach of a team that is actively trying to lose to paint another team’s competitive pursuit as unethical. And yes, this was a competitive pursuit. The game itself may not have been competitive, but Adebayo was competing with history and Spoelsta, I believe, was right not to get in the way of that.
