Bam Adebayo is mobbed by his teammates after Tuesday’s historic performance against the Wizards.
His nickname is the same as the sound caused by hitting everyone over the head with what he just did, because of course it is. Yes, this morning or afternoon, whenever you read this, you are certainly asking yourself what just happened and still woozy from the Bam!
Wilt Chamberlain, 100 points.
Kobe Bryant, 81 points.
And now, freshly wedged between those immortal single-game scoring totals is a player known for defense, a player whose previous scoring high was 41 points, a player who wasn’t an All-Star last month, a player whose career could generously be described as pretty good but hardly legendary.
Everything changed on a random yet manic March night in Miami with this entry:
Eldrice Femi Bam Adebayo, 83 points.
This perhaps qualifies as the biggest statistical surprise in NBA history. Is that prisoner-of-the-moment talk? Maybe not, because it came so unexpectedly, and it involves the glamorous art of scoring, and it’s now in the company of Wilt and Kobe, and it’s more than Michael Jordan or LeBron James ever managed.
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra opened his postgame press conference by saying: “Anything happen tonight?”
If Bam’s 83 becomes widely judged by the basketball gods as a fluke because of certain late-game antics and circumstances that contributed, so be it and so what?
It was witnessed by a disbelieving crowd cheering on Adebayo on Tuesday in Miami, teammates who deliriously did whatever necessary to help make it possible, the powerless Washington Wizards, and thousands around the country who rushed to their computers or phones and crashed NBA League Pass as the game progressed and his scoring total went stratospheric.
“It’s a special moment,” he said. “It’s Wilt, me, then Kobe, which sounds crazy.”
He shot 20-for-43 from the floor. Almost half of those attempts, 22, were on 3-pointers. This was a good player on a hot night, which happens frequently in the NBA, just not to this level or anywhere close, actually.
Before Tuesday, Adebayo averaged 4.8 free-throw attempts per game this season. He finished this game with an astounding 43 attempts, making 36 — which is rather impressive for a 77% shooter. His attempts and makes are single-game NBA records.
His teammates conspired to put him in the books. They fouled purposely down the stretch and early in the shot clock, sometimes as soon as the ball was inbounded, to get the ball back to Adebayo as much as possible, even with a comfortable lead that would eventually swell into the 30s. And Spoelstra was clearly co-signing this by keeping Adebayo in the game and throwing in his two cents.
With three minutes left, two Wizards players purposely took a charge against Adebayo. The Heat were up 25 but Spoelstra challenged the call to try to get Adebayo two more free-throw attempts. It was unsuccessful but again, everyone was in on it.
“The last six minutes of the third quarter and the entire fourth quarter I was a fan,” said Spoelstra. “This one came out of nowhere. This one snuck up on us. It snuck up on all of us. Once it kept on going, we knew we could be part of something special.”
Once Adebayo crept toward Kobe’s mythical 81, which is worshiped by the current generation, Spoelstra admitted: “You’re caught up in the moment like everyone else. And I didn’t want to get in the way. And I damn for sure wasn’t going to take him out.”
Adebayo did have 31 points in the first quarter and 43 at halftime. That raised possibilities. That was legitimate, with no theatrics by his teammates and against a full Wizards squad. Speaking of the Wizards, they benched their two best starters after three quarters, in particular Alex Sarr, their promising center, and therefore contributed to the cause.
In that situation, giving such player multiple cracks at the all-time single-game scoring list becomes an obligation by his coach and teammates, to measure how high and where he can take this performance. Any team will feed a hot player to see what happens next. And in this instance, it was a lot.
He had 63 points after three quarters. That was the tipping point. That’s when everyone knew something really unique was brewing. That was just six points fewer than Wilt’s total through three quarters in Hershey, Pa., on March 2, 1962 and 10 more than Kobe’s three quarters 20 years ago.
According to the book Wilt, 1962, an account of his record scoring night, his Philadelphia Warriors teammates constantly fed Wilt the ball in the fourth and stood by and watched. The Knicks, the opponent, began fouling all Warriors except Wilt. So those twin strategies went back and forth and Wilt was caught in the middle as the crowd screamed “give it to Wilt.”
As for Kobe’s 81, the Lakers didn’t conspire to help Kobe in the fourth quarter as much as Kobe helped himself. He took 13 of his team’s last 17 shots, although unlike Heat-Wizards, the game was competitive at that stage.
Sam Mitchell, the coach of the Toronto Raptors that night in LA, recently told NBA.com: “Go back and look at what types of shots he made. It’ll blow your mind. He was pump-faking three, four times and then spinning opposite of the defense while shooting it was Kobe freaking Bryant, man. Whatcha gonna do?”
Adebayo mentioned Kobe after his own record night, and added: “I wonder what he would say, to be 83 and pass him, my mind is like, what would he say to me? ‘Cause I always wanted to have a conversation with him he would probably tell me to do it again. Just a surreal moment to be in the company of somebody you idolized growing up.”
The Wizards became an understandable victim because the club has long veered toward the bottom of the East and toward the draft lottery. Washington, like most teams in such a situation, is using the final few weeks of the season to force-feed playing time to young players, essentially judging them now for the future. The downside is this philosophy made the Wizards vulnerable to this.
So these historic games are part-freakish, part-concocted and partly due to talented players who can’t miss. None are completely pure or explainable. They just happen and in the case of Bam Adebayo’s night, so inexplicably out of nowhere and by a very unlikely player.
“Unreal,” he said.
Shaun Powell has covered the NBA since 1985. You can e-mail him at spowell@nba.co, find his archive here and follow him on X.
