How should fans process Bam Adebayo’s 83-point night?

Bam Adebayo’s 83-point night against the Washington Wizards has elicited a ton of strong and varied reactions leaguewide and among NBA fans.

It was historic, of course, as only Wilt Chamberlain has scored more points in a single game. It was certainly unexpected, as Adebayo is not known as a prolific scorer and now has scored more points in a game than one of the purest scorers of all time, Kobe Bryant. It was emblematic of the NBA’s current style of play, in that Adebayo generated so many of his points on 3s and at the charity stripe, taking an NBA-record 43 free throws in the contest. It also ended with the Heat intentionally fouling Wizards players in a game that had long been decided to give Adebayo more chances to score.

How much weight should fans give to any of those facets of a unique combination of factors? What was it like to experience the historic night in real time? And now that some time has passed, how should Adebayo’s night be remembered historically?

We asked five NBA writers at The Athletic for their thoughts on Adebayo’s accomplishment.

As Adebayo’s big night unfolded, did it feel like history was being made, or did it feel artificial in any way?

John Hollinger: It felt like history had a chance to be made, but it didn’t feel real until the fourth quarter. Up until that point, there was too good a chance that either his scoring rate would peter out, the Heat would be so far ahead that they pulled him from the game or some combination of both.

As for the shenanigans of the last few minutes, those were unfortunate, but he was already at 70 on his own steam before things really got ridiculous.

Joe Vardon: I was too busy yelling at the TV while Team USA gave up homer after homer to the Italians in the World Baseball Classic … sigh. But the notifications were scooting across my phone all night. “Bam Adebayo scores 31 in the first quarter.” “Bam breaks LeBron James’ scoring record for the Heat.” “Bam has 70!” “One more point and Bam passes Kobe Bryant for second all time.”

It didn’t quite feel historic or artificial to me. It felt … strange? I don’t know.

Adebayo was averaging like 18 points per night heading into the game. I know Adebayo, having covered a bunch of Heat playoff runs and both of his gold medals for USA Basketball, and this is something I never imagined for him. But I made sure to tune in for the record-breaking free throws, then rewatched the game Wednesday.

If I am having to choose between legitimacy or not, I lean, after rewatching the game, way more towards legitimacy. Thirty-one in the first quarter is no joke.

Eric Nehm: From my seat at Fiserv Forum covering the Milwaukee Bucks’ latest loss, I didn’t watch most of the game. I did open the box score in a separate tab after I heard Adebayo scored 31 points in the first quarter. Then, he had 43 in the first half and 62 through three quarters.

That all seemed legitimate to me, so I’m not sure I can have many qualms with how the final 12 minutes unfolded. I watched the final three minutes and didn’t think much of the basketball played in that time. But chasing a scoring record often isn’t going to look pretty, so congratulations to Adebayo.

Eric Koreen: I was playing pick-up basketball. I heard about Adebayo’s big first half, checked in with the box score in the third quarter, saw he was at 52 and kept checking at every break. (Most of us are 40 or older, and we had no subs. There were many breaks.) As Adebayo’s numbers — points and free throws — rose, I told the rest of the guys playing, and a pop came from every new total: 60, 70, 77, 81, 83. Naturally, I wanted to see how he got those final points.

Upon review, it was all fairly legitimate until the last few minutes. He was dominating Alex Sarr, who is a legitimate NBA player, among others. When you get above 60 as quickly as Adebayo did, it’s history.

Now, I would have preferred if the Heat didn’t get ridiculous about things. Force-feed Adebayo? Sure. Intentionally miss free throws to give Adebayo chances for offensive rebounds? Foul the opposition so you can get the ball back quickly? Not for me. That made Bryant’s quest for 60 in his final game look pure by comparison.

The performance was a bit like Barry Bonds’ career: a legitimate all-timer on its own merits but made into one of the greatest scoring nights ever by artificial means.

Will Guillory: I was at the Houston Rockets-Toronto Raptors game, and it felt like something special was happening with Adebayo from the moment I saw he had 31 points in the first quarter. By the time he got to 70 points, I, along with several others in the media section, pulled up the Heat game on my laptop.

I love it when this game gives you an opportunity to see a moment that will last with all of us for a lifetime. What we love about sports isn’t the box scores or the stupid arguments about legacy. It’s the memories that stick with us forever because we got to witness something that may never happen again.

I was still in high school when Bryant scored 81 back in 2006, so I couldn’t fully grasp what that moment would mean to so many people for the next two decades. I definitely couldn’t tell you where I was when I first heard about it. But Tuesday night will stick with me. I’ll forever remember reacting at Toyota Center every time the improbable feat kept going when I thought it was over. The feat itself is significant enough, but the fact that Adebayo was the player who achieved it made the entire experience feel even more surreal.

It’ll go down as a night I’ll never forget. If that’s not history, I don’t know what is.

How much weight do you give this accomplishment compared to other high-scoring nights?

Nehm: Just as much as any other. I don’t really care how any player got to that rarified air. Scoring that many points is difficult. It’s a physical feat to take that many shots and put the ball in the hole that many times.

Vardon: I was there for Donovan Mitchell’s 71-point game, which came in a 21-point comeback for the Cavaliers in a contest that went to overtime. The Heat-Wizards didn’t have the same feel, but I don’t dock Adebayo because of the score of the game or the opponent. The Wizards are young, but the players on the court are not trying to lose. Adebayo blistered them.

It reminded me of Kobe’s farewell 60-point game, where the Lakers were getting out of the way to let him shoot as much as possible. Perhaps the Heat were doing the same. I applaud them all for playing along with something cool in a regular season that is way too long and will be stale from now until the end of the NCAA Tournament.

Koreen: There is a level of artifice to all of these games. To me, the way the Heat played the final few moments hangs a tiny asterisk on things. I mostly don’t care, though. It had the whiff of a sideshow, but 83 is 83.

Adebayo’s true-shooting percentage of 67 percent is the lowest of any 70-plus-point game in the 3-point era. Then again, there have only been eight of those games. If you want to pretend he scored 73 instead of 83, that’s fine by me. It was an awesome individual performance, regardless.

Hollinger: In some ways, it’s even more remarkable to see a center do this. He can’t commandeer the ball and dribble up and shoot himself; he generally needs to be set up. Centers also shoot fewer 3s, in general. Because of those two things, guard scoring tends to have more peaks and valleys, and the random 50-point games by guards like Tony Delk or Malachi Flynn are the ones that stand out.

This relationship obviously broke down late in Adebayo’s game as the point total became Miami’s only objective. But his output in the first three quarters was a pretty remarkable feat for a guy in his role.

Does that make it “better” or ‘worse” than Kobe’s 81 or Wilt’s 100 or Joel Embiid’s 70? This one does feel a bit more AstroTurf-y than the others, sure. But Adebayo also had to do some pretty remarkable things for a player of his ilk just to get anywhere near 80, as evidenced by the fact that he more than doubled his previous career high of 41.

Guillory: It’s up there with any of the greatest scoring performances I’ve ever seen. The fact that Adebayo – someone who’s never been known as a prolific scorer – pulled it off makes it even more special in my eyes.

Many folks at home don’t comprehend how difficult it is to put together these kinds of elite scoring performances. Unfortunately, today’s hot-take, championship-or-bust commentary within sports belittles the accomplishments of these incredible athletes and makes it seem like the stuff they do at the highest level is somehow easy.

He only did it because he shot 43 free throws. Do you think Washington wanted to give Adebayo all those trips to the line? Don’t you think he had to play with a certain level of aggression to get those whistles?

Anyone who puts the foul-baiting tag on Adebayo doesn’t know enough about his game. I’ve heard players talk about how physically exhausting it is just to put up 35 points in a game. Some have told me their gas tanks were empty after being asked to take 25 shots in a game. To get up 43 shots and 43 free throws shows how much physical pressure Adebayo put on himself to cement this achievement. The stamina required to do something like this is remarkable.

Adebayo’s record-breaking night wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as Embiid’s 70-point game or Mitchell’s 71-point night a few seasons ago. Those guys are more natural shot makers. But again, that’s what makes Adebayo’s achievement even more impressive. He got it done with sheer will.

Does Adebayo shooting 43 free throws cheapen the accomplishment in any way?

Vardon: No, come on, bruh. This is Kobe bias. And while I get it (his legions of fans believe him to be not only the greatest Laker, but the greatest player ever, over Jordan and LeBron and Kareem and Wilt — and three of those guys are or were LAKERS!), I am not looking for ways to discredit a 6-foot-9 big whose previous career high was 41 points for more than doubling that number.

In fact, I love that Adebayo scored 36 at the line, almost eclipsing his previous career best solely on free throws. Was he not fouled?

I’d argue that the 43 free throws suggest his points came against a Wizards team that was trying to defend. It just … didn’t go so well. Remember when Brett Favre fell so Michael Strahan could set the NFL single-season record for sacks? Or when the Steelers tanked a game and nearly their playoff chances last season trying to make sure Myles Garrett didn’t break the sacks record? Those were cheap moves.

Koreen: I think Adebayo’s 22 3-point attempts — his previous career high in attempted 3s was 13, and his high before this season was seven — does as much to “cheapen” things as the free throws. It shows that he was playing unnaturally in pursuit of a crooked number.

As for the free throws, I could quibble with a few of the late-game whistles. There were a few instances in which I agreed with Wizards coach Brian Keefe, who said Adebayo got some very iffy calls by essentially running into some Wizards defenders on the perimeter. Again, up until the fourth quarter, the Wizards had no answers for him except putting him at the stripe.

Adebayo is not Kobe. He was never going to do this on silky turnaround jumpers and graceful drives. But the 43 free-throw attempts says as much about the Wizards defense as it does Adebayo.

I’m not going to ding him much for dominating a bad team into submission. If anything, it was yet another side effect of the league’s tanking crisis.

Nehm: Through three quarters, Adebayo had taken 27 free throws. That would have already been the NBA’s season high for free-throw attempts in a game, besting Shai Gilgeous-Alexander taking 26 free throws in a double overtime win over the Pacers in October. The Wizards decided that sending Adebayo to the free-throw line was a viable strategy for the night.

I can disagree with their strategy, but I can’t fault Adebayo for taking advantage.

Guillory: It’s certainly not the scoring exhibition we’ve seen from other guys when they have historic scoring games. Adebayo’s highlight reel coming out of this one won’t be as pretty, which may explain why some may say his game wasn’t as impressive as Kobe’s or Embiid’s or Mitchell’s. When it comes to scoring in the NBA, some folks have a certain expectation about how difficult the shots must be and how much skill is required to make those shots.

I’m not coming out of this game feeling like Adebayo should all of a sudden be looked at as a top-five scorer in the league. Frankly, he probably isn’t the best scorer on his team. But I still have a tremendous amount of respect for the effort and aggression it requires to draw as many fouls as he did, especially against a defense that was doing everything in its power to stop him from reaching 81 points.

Hollinger: A lot of those free throws came early, in the flow of the game, so I don’t think that part cheapens things. Free throws count just like other points do.

Also, he left money on the table! Adebayo missed seven free throws. Making 36 of 43 (83.7 percent) is better than his season mark of 78.1 percent, but we should expect that since players, historically, have tended to do better as they get more free-throw attempts within a given game. What if he’d had an outlier night from the stripe and made, say, 40 of 43?

Should Bam have left the game once he got to 81 to honor Kobe Bryant? Why or why not?

Vardon: What? No. I wish he could have gone for 90. Credit to him and to Erik Spoelstra for respecting the moment and the sport.

Guillory: I legitimately laughed out loud when I read this question. Is this really a thing?

In competition, somebody has to win, and somebody has to lose. Sometimes, the people we like end up on the losing side. Sometimes the records that are held by our favorites are broken by people we don’t hold in as much reverence.

When Robert Horry had a chance to win his seventh NBA title, should he have declined out of respect for Michael Jordan? Back in 2007, when Barry Bonds had a chance to become the home run king, should he have chosen to not swing his bat out of respect for Hank Aaron? To me, this entire concept is more disrespectful than anything Adebayo or Spoelstra did in the fourth quarter Tuesday game.

Would this sentiment be out there if Victor Wembanyama were the one who scored 83? What about Anthony Edwards? I highly doubt it. Instead, much of the commentary would be fawning over these great young players and repeating the same annoying discussions about the future face of the league.

While Adebayo isn’t a top-10 player, he is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a three-time All-Star and one of the most revered players to ever wear a Heat uniform. We can honor Adebayo for his historic accomplishment and still hold Kobe’s 81 with the same regard it had before Tuesday night.

Hollinger: Please, people, enough with the Kobe worship. It’s OK if records get broken, and even more OK if not-even-a-records get broken. If Adebayo was going to go through the trouble of staying on the court in a blowout win that long, it wasn’t so he could stop at 81 out of some weird compulsion to genuflect at the Kobe altar. I agree with those who feel Kobe’s 81 was more difficult than Adebayo’s 83, but it wasn’t on Adebayo to stop.

Koreen: I’m not a Kobe acolyte. I appreciate him as one of the greatest players ever, but his records are not holy to me. As someone who grew up just outside of Toronto, I watched that 81-point game from my couch. It lives in semi-infamy in these parts.

It was amazing. It also wasn’t even the record. Until Tuesday, Bryant’s 81 were the second-most points ever scored in a game. I have problems with how the Heat handled the final few minutes, but daring to zoom past 81 is not one of them. We don’t need to be that precious about history, even if Bryant’s performance was greater in many objective ways.

Nehm: One of Bryant’s most famous quotes is, “Job’s not finished.” He was endlessly competitive and absolutely ruthless. I feel like it would have gone against everything he believed in to stop on the precipice of history, so no, I don’t think Adebayo should have stopped at 81.

Six of the 16 70-plus scoring games have happened in the last 10 years. Thirty of the 93 games of 60 or more have happened in the last decade. What does that say about this moment in NBA history? Is this a sign that the NBA needs to make it harder for teams to score?

Hollinger: The issue isn’t that it’s “harder” to score; it’s that you can get more points on a given possession because of the 3-pointer, and you get more possessions because of the pace. Empty trips are about as frequent as they’ve always been, but 41.5 percent of a team’s shots are 3-pointers now — about triple the rate of 30 years ago — and games have 10 more possessions for each side than at the turn of the century.

That, plus the higher variance of the 3, makes it much more likely to have single-game eruptions.

Koreen: Teams have gone crazy for efficiency by prioritizing free throws, layups and 3s, and volume via obsessing over the possession battle. While teams vary in their approaches, that teams are doubling and tripling down on the math of it all shows us why we’re here.

I’m fine with the 3-point arc staying where it is. I don’t think you can un-ring the bell of teams learning that it is way easier to score earlier in the shot clock than later, creating a higher-possession game. A 130-128 game can be beautiful.

I would like the league to allow defenders a bit more leeway when guarding one-on-one. Referees have cut down on rewarding shooters’ wild attempts with free throws over the last few seasons, but there are still several instances every game that leave me baffled as to what a defender is allowed to do when a ballhandler initiates contact. There is some more work to do there, not only to give the defender a fair shake, but also because free throws are boring.

But I don’t think we need any radical changes to curb scoring, either.

Nehm: Tuesday night made me feel like it might actually be possible for Wilt’s 100-point record to be eclipsed in the next month. I’ve never thought that before in my three and a half decades on this planet.

Much of what Hollinger laid out is true about this era, but this specific season is even more ripe for high-scoring performances than any before it. One-third of the league is tanking — or, at least, actively not putting their best foot forward. At the same time, those teams are pushing the pace and shooting a lot of 3s themselves to give their players as many developmental reps as possible.

Combine those two things, and you have maybe the most favorable scoring environment star players have ever seen.

Guillory: It definitely shows that more guys can reach the 60-70-point threshold in today’s game because it is so fast-paced and the 3-point numbers are higher than ever before. I wouldn’t be shocked if we see multiple 70-point games over the next few years. Maybe somebody beats Bam’s 83-point night within the next five years. The talent level in the NBA is incredibly high, and the thought players put into how they can score against these complex defenses is remarkable.

Although I’ve been arguing that Adebayo’s achievement deserves a ton of credit because he isn’t known for his scoring, I’m sure other players will look at what he did and think they can beat it. I’d certainly love to watch some of these guys try.

Vardon: No. The NBA should not legislate at all when it comes to scoring. We know scoring is up because players are better at the game. Twenty years ago, would Adebayo have even attempted 10 3s in a game, let alone made seven? How about in a week? Plus, there are way more chances to score because there are more possessions.

I suspect a team will eventually figure out how to win a ton of games by slowing the pace way, way down, playing with four bigs and winning on defense. And the league will copy that team.