Second in points, last in ethics?
That will be the accusation against the Miami Heat and Bam Adebayo, after the big man moved into second on the NBA’s single-game scoring list with 83 points against the woeful Washington Wizards on Tuesday. Adebayo surpassed the 81 points that Kobe Bryant scored in a 2006 game and left only Wilt Chamberlain, with 100 in a game in 1962, ahead of him on the all-time list.
The Heat won, 150-129, and basketball watchers quickly turned their attention to the most skeptical, cynical line of questioning possible: Was Adebayo’s achievement sullied by the Heat’s decision to build their gameplan around letting him pack the stat sheet as much as possible in a long-decided contest? On the record sheet, the answer will be no. But as most people in the NBA well know, the stat line takes a distant second place to fans’ perceptions of players and their accomplishments. And the manner in which the Heat helped Adebayo get to 83 will be under the microscope for a long time.
One the one hand: Anyone who takes issue with Adebayo scoring 83 points –more than the entire Milwaukee Bucks team managed in a game earlier this month – is a pedantic loser. This league holds 1,230 regular-season games each year. Just among starting players, that works out to 12,300 individual games per year. Exactly one of those opportunities, in the whole history of the NBA, has yielded more points than Adebayo put on the Wizards on Tuesday. Objectively, there is no such thing as a “cheap” way to do something that no player other than Wilt has ever done.
Moreover, Adebayo’s 43 field goal attempts are not a major outlier. Chamberlain put up a hilarious 63 shots in his 100-pointer, Bryant 46 on the night he scored 81. Adebayo was also busy in other respects; he pulled down a game-high nine rebounds, with eight of them coming on defense in his 42 minutes, the most of any player on court. It’s not like the 28-year-old was slacking on the other end.
On the other hand, what fun would sports be if we couldn’t spend time and energy tearing players down on the occasion of their grandest achievements? Where Adebayo’s game reaches the theater of the absurd is at the foul line. The previous record for free-throw attempts in an NBA game was 39, reached twice by Dwight Howard during the “Hack-a-Howard” era in 2012 and 2013. Teams knew Howard wouldn’t make much more than six in 10 free throws, and they felt fine sending him to the stripe to make 21 and 25 out of his 39 shots on those respective nights. Adebayo took a new-record 43 free throws on Tuesday and, to his credit, made 36 of them. Nothing dishonorable about cashing in one’s opportunities.
Or maybe there is, when a player’s team turns the late stages of the game into a joke whose sole purpose is to run up one guy’s numbers at the foul line. In the fourth quarter, Adebayo was 3-for-8 from the field and a gruesome 1-of-6 from the three-point line. But the Heat kept feeding him, and the Wizards kept fouling him to send him to the line. That would normally be no big deal, except Miami, leading by nearly 30 points in the final few minutes, repeatedly fouled the Wizards to speed up their possessions and get the ball back. Adebayo hit 14 of 16 foul shots in the final 12 minutes.
Even that doesn’t fully explain how farcical Miami’s effort to get Adebayo to 83 was. The Heat simply gave Adebayo the ball and had him run full steam ahead at the Washington basket, taking low-percentage shots that may or may not lead to a foul call. In just the final five minutes of a game that was long over, Adebayo went 1-of-5 from the field and 7-of-7 at the foul line, with his final points coming at the line with 1:16 left to push the lead to 150-126. You have to watch the video for yourself to understand how uninterested the Heat were in playing anything resembling regular “offense.” The end of this game was pure stat sheet-stuffing, which paid off in buckets when Adebayo nailed his 42nd and 43rd attempts from the stripe. Heat’s head coach, Erik Spoelstra, had the decency to sub Adebayo out eight seconds later, the big fella having inched past Bryant on the scoring list. It was not much different than a 10-year-old video gamer trying to run up a gaudy total against the CPU after school.
None of this means Adebayo’s night wasn’t extraordinary. Eighty-three is the highest point total in the league’s three-point era (since 1979), and for a frontcourt player to get there is truly out of this world. Only Joel Embiid in 2024 and David Robinson in 1994 had even gotten to 70 among big men in that span, and neither cleared 71. Adebayo – a very good rather than a great player – had a great enough game that historians won’t be able to ignore him. But the manner in which he got into the record books means the haters will still hate. Perhaps he’ll go for 84 sometime.
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