Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz react to Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo scoring 83 points against the Washington Wizards and passing Kobe Bryant for second-most points in an NBA game behind only Wilt Chamberlain. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.
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Video Transcript
83 points for Bam Adebayo last night against the Wizards.
Second most points in a single game in NBA history.
A night nobody saw coming.
In fact, Bam last night scored more points than the New York football Jets did all season.
All right?
Combined.
That’s how many- So in the moment I was letting myself enjoy it.
I was, you know, giving Bam all of his flowers.
While last night I felt like that was the appropriate thing to do, and waking up this morning I can now say, okay, well, when, you know, 36 of your 83 points come off of free throws, maybe I look at it just a little bit differently.
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Maybe it feels just a little bit exaggerated.
Maybe it feels just a little bit flubbed.
It doesn’t take away from the accomplishment.
It doesn’t make it any less cool.
It doesn’t make it any less of a record.
It doesn’t make it any less of 83 points.
But when we’re living in an NBA world where we feel like the players don’t care, where we feel like everyone’s tanking, where everything feels a little fugazy, fugazi, where things in the N- in the NBA feel a little gilded, this just kind of played into that as well.
Still awesome.
Well- But I, I, I’m tor- I’m torn on that, and I’ll, I’ll go back to some basketball historians that told me things I didn’t know.
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But, for anyone that doesn’t remember this, the Wilt Chamberlain 100-point game, was also very similar.
He, he was fouled over and over and over again.
In fact, at the time he set, in that 100-point game, he set a record for most free throws made at 28 in that.
Which at the time- Mm-hmm was an impossibly high number.
And it got so bad in Wilt’s 100-point game that the opposing team was actually fouling his teammates just to try and get anybody but Wilt to be able to touch the ball.
So it’s crazy the lengths they went to for Wilt’s 100-point game to sort of stop the dominance of Wilt.
I say that not because I’m taking anything away from Wilt, but it, it’s a reminder to us that we forget context.
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So in five years I don’t think people are gonna remember that Bam got fouled in this thing over and over and over again.
It’s also not Bam’s fault.
Like, the Wizards were playing scrimmage defense at best.
And if the Wizards can’t find a way to slow him down throughout the course of the game, and then their argument becomes, “I’m just going to foul him every time he touches the ball,” like, who do I blame in that point for turning this thing into a spectacle?
Do I blame Bam or do I blame the Wizards who couldn’t find any legitimate way to slow him down?
I don’t know.
I just think in the history books we won’t even remember that.
What we’ll remember is 83 points tops Kobe.