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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.
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Related: Miami’s Bam Adebayo erupts for 83 points, second only to Wilt in NBA history
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.
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On the other hand, what fun would sports be if we…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/bam-adebayo-just-scored-83-120734614.html
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Publish date : 2026-03-11 12:07:00
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