Tuesday night was fascinating for me as a sports fan.
I started my night by watching my college’s depressingly bad basketball team lose to Northwestern to end its season in the Big Ten tournament, then switched the channel to watch Team USA lose in embarrassing fashion to Italy in the World Baseball Classic.
At the same time, I was mildly aware of Alexis Lafreniere scoring a hat trick for the Rangers, Jaylen Brown getting ejected in a high-profile game against the Spurs, and a niche game between the Heat
and Wizards that would later go down in NBA history.
I was first aware of Bam Adebayo’s historic night when someone told me he scored 31 points in the first quarter. It was surprising, sure, but it’s the 2026 Wizards. At some point, the Heat will begin to blow them out, and Adebayo will eventually hit the bench with a career scoring effort. He had 43 at half, another shocking sum, but nothing insane was on the radar with the Heat well on their way to a blowout victory.
But they just kept feeding him. He kept going to the line. I got Real notifications that he had 50; he had SIXTY points in the third quarter. At that point, I still didn’t turn on League Pass. In my mind, there was no way he’d stay in the game to make any serious history, right?
But he played most of the fourth quarter. He got to 70, and I finally relented. What I saw in the final five minutes of that game was some of the most shameless basketball I’ve ever seen from the referees, the players on both teams, and the coaches. The Wizards were sending triple-teams, the Heat were intentionally fouling to get more possessions, and Erik Spoelstra refused to remove his big-money star in a 30-point game.
Adebayo ultimately did get to end the game on the bench, but not before scoring 83 points. There’s a sect of the NBA community that sees the lack of broadcast evidence of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game and refuses to believe it exists. Putting aside the fact that it’s totally irrational that it was totally ridiculous that the basketball media would make up a black man scoring 100 points in a game in 1962, there are people who consider Kobe Bryant’s 81 points in 2006 against the Toronto Raptors as the single-game scoring mark to beat.
So, for those people who believe Wilt never scored 100, Bam Adebayo is now the standard for single-game dominance. Bam Adebayo, who has never scored 45 in a game prior to Tuesday night, had indisputably scored the most points in an NBA game in over 60 years and, to some people, the most points ever.
That fact is just jarring to me. Bam is an incredible player, don’t get me wrong. He’s a multi-time all-star, a staple on All-Defensive teams, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, and will almost certainly have his No. 13 retired by a Heat organization that’s had many great players don its colors. He’ll likely be enshrined in the Hall of Fame one day, but he isn’t known as a pure scorer.
The players to score 70 points in an NBA game are a who’s who of scoring talent: Wilt Chamberlain, Kobe Bryant, Luka Doncic, David Thompson, David Robinson, Elgin Baylor, Joel Embiid, Devin Booker, Damian Lillard, and Donovan Mitchell. All of these guys are or were capable of scoring 40 on any given night, even if only a few are inner-circle Hall of Famers.
How far down the list do you have to go before you find a player on the level of Adebayo’s offensive skills? MJ scored 69. Pete Maravich scored 68. Giannis and Rick Barry scored 64. The most points ever scored by a player to average under 20 PPG for his career is Joe Fulks, who scored 63 in 1949.
Fulks was the first NBA player to score 60 in a game and held the single-game scoring record until Elgin Baylor’s 64-point game in 1959. Fulks is an interesting piece of trivia in NBA history as maybe the league’s first shot-chucker. He averaged 19.1 FGA per game in his career and shot 30.2% from the field. He led the NBA in scoring in 1947-48 while shooting 25.9% from the field on over 25 shots per game. He’s the Father of NBA Tour Dates. If you want a laugh, go to @extrastats on Twitter and search for Fulks on his account.
The day Fulks scored 63 points, he attempted 56 shots and took 14 free throws. He shot 48.2% from the field, which is a modern-day equivalent of if Cam Thomas shot 70% from the field in a 40-piece. No player had ever scored more than 63 points and shot worse than 50%… until Adebayo on Tuesday. His 67.0 TS% is the least efficient 65+-point game since the invention of the 3-point line.
But I think the thing that’s been bothering me the most about this game is the way it progressed. Adebayo was absolutely tremendous in the first quarter, scoring 31 points on 10-for-17 from the field and making five three-pointers. Even if he was playing the Wizards, it was an all-time great quarter.
But the way the game ended is what soured me. The Wizards, in their desperate attempt to tank and keep their draft pick, load managed Trae Young. Alex Sarr scored 28 points, but he was limited to 20 minutes and sat out the game’s final 18. They did the same with Tre Johnson. The poor players that had to stop a coordinated effort to give Adebayo his moment were the likes of Will Riley, Anthony Gill, and Jalen Hardy.
Granted, part of that is because the Wizards were being blown out, but that’s another thing. Adebayo was being force-fed the ball and was just running full speed into defenders to draw fouls in the paint. Miami’s benchwarmers were fouling to get more possessions. It’s as if Jalen Brunson was playing with Trey Jemison III, Kevin McCullar Jr., and Pacome Dadiet in the final minutes of a blowout victory.
Speaking of Brunson, can he get some of these free throws next time he plays the Wizards? An NBA-record 43 free throw attempts. The only other players to even get within 10 of that number were notoriously bad free-throw shooters who were intentionally put on the line (or Wilt, who was both a poor free-throw shooter and dominant enough to get to the line naturally). Brunson’s 61-point game against the Spurs a few years ago is the second-best in history with less than 10 FTA (Rick Barry had 5 FTA in a 64-point game in 1974).
But we’d be getting into a whole different debate if we were talking about how ethical a high-scoring game is. Kobe’s 81-point game saw him put the finishing touches on a blowout, but he also had to power a very bad supporting cast back from a 14-point halftime deficit. Bryant scored his last seven points from the free-throw line in the final 2:36, but it was only a 13-point game at that point, and even then, that’s 74.
There are even reports of similar tactics to the ones the Heat used back in 1962, used by the Philadelphia Warriors to get Wilt to 100. You can argue that if we’re talking about ethics, Wilt’s 78-point game in a double-overtime win three months before he dropped 100 is the standard for ethical, ballistic scoring games. (Fun fact about that one: Wilt went 16-for-31 at the line. He would’ve scored 90 if he shot granny-style like he did when he scored 100.)
In the end, it happened. Regardless of how you feel, Bam Adebayo made history on Tuesday night. It was surreal to watch as someone who didn’t see Kobe score 81.
It just feels weird.
