Wilt Chamberlain’s NBA record of scoring 100 points in a game has stood for over 63 years. No one has approached it in nearly 24,000 days. I’ve long thought it was basketball’s version of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak for the New York Yankees in 1941 — an unbreakable mark.
But while the DiMaggio hitting streak has only become more inconceivable as the rate of batted balls in play in Major League Baseball continues to drop, I’m actually starting to wonder if trends across the NBA are starting to make a 100-point game plausible under the right conditions. Bam Adebayo’s 83-point performance on Tuesday for the Miami Heat — one that should be applauded and not at all castigated, given that he dropped 62 points in three quarters and was an unstoppable inside-out force — showed the blueprint in many ways.
League-average offenses continue to skyrocket, with NBA teams hitting a record high of 115.4 points per 100 possessions so far this year. The league’s pace of play is at its since highest pre-pandemic marks, averaging 99.4 possessions per 48 minutes. That’s the third-highest mark since 1990. But more than that, teams continue to lean into heliocentric offensive engines. Did you know that of the top 33 players in NBA history in terms of usage rate, 18 of them are currently playing?
Adebayo’s 83-point game played into these trends perfectly and showed the model for how to achieve Chamberlain’s hallowed mark. The Heat play at the fastest tempo in the league, and with injuries to Tyler Herro, Norman Powell, Andrew Wiggins and Kel’el Ware, Adebayo’s usage went through the roof. The Heat needed him, and he obliged with a career-best performance on top of some late-game shenanigans to get him over the 80-point plateau.
But I also can’t ignore what was happening on the other side of the court and how that plays into this. The Washington Wizards are not a particularly competitive basketball team right now. They have lost nine games in a row (six of those games by at least 17 points), and we’re well and truly into the tanking portion of the season. They have the league’s 29th-ranked defense, the NBA’s worst net rating and play at the seventh-fastest pace in the league. Because the NBA incentivizes teams to lose en masse after you’ve been eliminated from the playoffs, the Wizards are better off dropping the rest of their games to receive a better draft pick — especially leading into what is a loaded 2026 NBA Draft class.
On Tuesday, the Wizards started one of the youngest lineups I’ve ever seen on an NBA court with Will Riley, Bub Carrington, Bilal Coulibaly, Tre Johnson and Alex Sarr. All five of those players have at least shown flashes at different points of their young careers and look interesting long-term, but Coulibaly is the oldest of the group at just over 21 1/2 years old. No NBA team can be expected to defend at a reasonable level with that kind of inexperience on the court across the board. I don’t blame the Wizards; they’re not the only ones tanking. There are 10 teams across the league right now that have absolutely zero reason to win games and every reason to lose them. Players don’t tank, but front offices and organizations certainly put teams out on the court that may not have much of a chance to win. It’s just a reality that the NBA has a tanking issue that it is seemingly going to try to fix in the offseason.
Combine all of those factors, and it gets easier — not easy, but at least more understandable — to envision how a 100-point game could occur in March or April if a team wanted to shamelessly chase points for a player, as the Heat did at the end of the game for Adebayo. Remember: Adebayo broke the league record with 43 free throws attempted (making 36 of them), but he also shot only 20 of 43 from the field and 7 of 22 from 3. There was more meat on the bone in this game for him somehow.
I still remember the first time I saw Adebayo play. It was in the summer before his senior year of high school, when he matched up against future lottery pick and — at the time — the No. 1 prospect in his recruiting class, Thon Maker. I was standing next to Tom Crean, the Indiana University coach at the time, who told me that he thought Adebayo was a future No. 1 pick type of talent. Given that Adebayo has a very good chance to wind up in the Basketball Hall of Fame, I think we can chalk that evaluation up as a win for Crean. On top of that, Adebayo is still getting better. Adebayo’s overall improvement as a perimeter player has gone underrated this year within Miami’s new five-out offensive scheme.
Still, I don’t think he would have been on a list of the 40 players most likely to drop 83 points in a game if you’d asked NBA executives before Tuesday night, which says something about how many players in the league could approximate this if they had the right opportunity.
It would undeniably take a combination of factors similar to Tuesday — factors that often don’t replicate themselves with the injuries, a star player getting nuclear hot early on, a fast pace of play from the two teams, the tanking strategy engulfing at least one of the teams and (frankly) a lack of shame from the team employing said nuclear hot player.
The mystique has been lifted from the achievement on some level, through no fault of Adebayo. Simply put, this is what the NBA is now. It’s probably not better off for it, but it’s the reality until the league can fix its competitiveness issue. I wonder if Adebayo’s performance — on stark display in an era when games are televised internationally and everyone has access to see what happened — could help lead to changes enacted by the league office. It would be great if fans didn’t have to parse through their feelings when a genuinely impressive and truly great achievement occurs.
Who could be next? Would it surprise anyone if the Los Angeles Lakers’ Luka Dončić had one of his hot shooting games in March or April against a tanking team, lived at the foul line while chasing points and made a run at it? Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards has in-game stretches in which he looks entirely unstoppable. The same goes for Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell. Giannis Antetokounmpo dropped 64 in a December 2023 game for the Milwaukee Bucks in which he played only 37 minutes and had a usage rate 10 percent lower than Adebayo’s last night. If the Bucks really wanted to repeatedly call Giannis’ number for a full game against a young team that couldn’t match up with him physically, who would stop him?
Adebayo should undeniably be proud of his accomplishment. It was a special night and an unbelievable display of shot-making for the first three quarters. The Heat are not the only team to have force-fed the ball to a player late in a game to boost his point totals; Chamberlain’s record game unfolded similarly. Kobe Bryant took 46 shots in his 81-point game in 2006, racking up a usage rate similar to Adebayo’s.
And given the current trends in the league, who’s to say the next star who finds himself in the perfect conditions couldn’t also find 17 more points than Adebayo did on Tuesday?