We may express in the following manner the fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. —Rudolf Clausius, 1865
I didn’t know it was going to be 83, but it was just the way the game was going. The energy—the ball—kept finding me. —Bam Adebayo, 2026
Holy shit. One night after Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tied Wilt Chamberlain’s streak of most consecutive 20-point games, Bam Adebayo, in one of the most absurd performances in professional sports, came a couple of points closer to Chamberlain’s mythical 100-point night than any other player in NBA history. Miami Heat fans in attendance at Kaseya Center were treated to the surreality of seeing Adebayo, ironically their long-unheralded defensive mastermind, set a new modern scoring record: 83 points in a single game, overtaking Kobe Bryant’s legendary 81-point performance 20 years ago.
It was a perfect confluence of chaos channeled into a willing and able vessel. Adebayo had already set a new career high in points by halftime; he’d more than double his previous best of 41 points en route to history. Adebayo made as many 3s against the Wizards (seven) as he did in his first five seasons in the league combined, and he attempted more 3s (22) than he had in his first six seasons combined. He attempted 43 free throws, the most for any player ever in a single game, including the postseason. Hell, Bam’s league-record 36 makes alone would place him third on that list, tied with Andre Drummond and behind only Shaquille O’Neal and Dwight Howard. Notice a trend in Adebayo’s company? Shaq, Dwight, and Drummond were all targeted victims of the “Hack-a-Shaq” method of possession control. As much as the free throw merchant label has become a scarlet letter in recent years, you don’t reach these astronomical attempt numbers by being good at them. That is, unless you’re Bamonte, repeatedly driving down Washington’s gullet. The Wizards weren’t trying to get Bam to the line; they just happen to have the worst defense in modern NBA history.
A fairly large percentage of players in the league could probably score 50 points in a game if everything aligned in their favor. There have been 638 instances in history of an NBA player scoring at least 50 points in a game—and there are more than a few outliers within that cohort. Malachi Flynn scored 50 at the end of the 2023-24 season and has played in just 10 NBA games since. Willie Burton scored 53 as a Sixer in 1995 and played for the Continental Basketball Association’s Florida Beach Dogs the following season. Corey Brewer dropped 51 in a game in 2014—three years later, after smoking a layup with the Rockets under Mike D’Antoni, Brewer told his coach, “I did my thing, but then I got to the rim and just ran out of talent.”
This moment might be a bizarre capstone for one of the era’s genre-defining defensive big men, but few players in the history of the league are built to handle the kind of load he was given; Bam, if only for a night, proved that he is.
There is certainly some randomness at play here with Adebayo, but last night is also a testament to Bam’s capacity to rise to the challenge when given the opportunity of a lifetime. Adebayo’s ever-growing capacity as an on-ball player has been one of the most impressive development arcs of the past decade, after he was stifled by coach John Calipari’s notoriously rigid demands for his centers at Kentucky. This moment might be a bizarre capstone for one of the era’s genre-defining defensive big men, but few players in the history of the league are built to handle the kind of load he was given; Bam, if only for a night, proved that he is.
Adebayo had scored 62 points by the end of the third quarter, just seven points off Wilt’s total when he was heading into the fourth quarter of his historic night 64 years ago, in front of a half-empty arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “The last six minutes of the third quarter and the entire fourth quarter, I was a fan,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told reporters after the game. “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.”
At that point, the sideshow becomes the show itself; the express purpose of the game denatures, and new priorities emerge for both teams—it’s like the opposite of tanking, but with the same nauseating side effects. By the end of the game, intentional fouls were being liberally committed by both teams. I found myself giddy watching the scene unfold, invested in Bam’s bizarre pursuit of history. But even I had to let out an audible groan when Miami’s Keshad Johnson, who was fouled to keep Bam away from the ball, intentionally bricked his second free throw attempt with 1:25 remaining in the game. The Heat wanted to create as many possessions for Bam as possible; the Wizards were desperate to foul any non-Adebayo player who had the ball in his hands. That exact same desperate strategy played out in Wilt’s 100-point performance, according to accounts and recollections from those who were present for the game. It was all shameless, but in a way, it was all fair play. Ethics are rendered meaningless at the precipice of history—we should know that by now.
Bam Adebayo celebrates after defeating the Wizards
The morning sports-talk debaters will get themselves into a lather shouting about how it was a fraudulent performance, how it speaks to a sort of crisis in the league—the way they talked about Luka Doncic dropping 73 against the Hawks two years ago. And, indeed, if Adebayo’s performance is to carry any sort of legacy, it may stand as a microcosm of tanking as we know it—a night when incentives overwhelmed structure and the normal order of competition dissolved.
There are now 11 players who have ever scored at least 70 points in an NBA game. Those names on the leaderboard serve as a kind of historical shorthand for the progression of basketball writ large. Five of those 11—Adebayo, Doncic, Joel Embiid, Donovan Mitchell, and Damian Lillard—have accomplished the feat in the past three years, evidence of a statistical inflation that speaks to the era. The league has reached its apex in possessions created and 3-pointers attempted, fostering an ideal environment for historic offensive output. The names become markers of their respective eras. Elgin Baylor set the original blueprint for the modern superstar wing. Chamberlain will forever be the statistical behemoth who serves as a sort of omnipresent historical backdrop. Without David Thompson, there might not have been a Michael Jordan. David Robinson had to fight for his moment among his fellow megafauna in the mid-’90s, a micro-era that was increasingly defined by Hakeem Olajuwon and O’Neal, the latter of whom had long hoped to usurp Wilt as the most dominant basketball player ever. Kobe—the Jordan acolyte who stood in the long shadow of both Baylor and Thompson—and his 81-point game stand as a modern-day epic of tortured persistence. Devin Booker, one of Kobe’s most successful apostles, scored 70, as if in tribute, the season after Bryant’s retirement.
It was all shameless, but in a way, it was all fair play. Ethics are rendered meaningless at the precipice of history—we should know that by now.
I think this is what I mean by historical shorthand. It’s how we make sense of history, isn’t it? By turning moments into symbols and placing them side by side for comparison, in hopes of preserving what we want preserved. But it’s really just an exercise in imagination and creative storytelling. Things aren’t ever that tidy, that orderly, no matter how much we’d like them to be.
In the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years before Adebayo hit his final two free throws on Tuesday night, it felt like Kobe’s 81-point night would forever be the NBA’s modern scoring Olympus, if only because the performance had come to symbolize Kobe himself. It’s no shock to see fans wrestle with their uneasiness about the wedge between Chamberlain and Bryant, to see Adebayo’s night besmirched in its immediate afterglow. Bam has disrupted the order of things. He scribbled on top of a sacred scroll.
But that’s also why Bam’s performance ruled. It was thrilling precisely because it was nonsensical. Because it is a true aberration, largely untethered to the lineage of the game’s greatest scorers. There is no precedent for what he did, nothing that could have prepared us for this outcome, this reality.
“I still cannot fully understand what just happened,” Adebayo said after the game.
Perfect. That makes all of us.
