Stop Caveating Greatness

Bam had a right, a responsibility, to chase history. He did, and we're better off for it.

A few years ago, when Basketball Poetry was just a wee young blog, Donovan Mitchell scored 71 points in an overtime game, and the Internet lost its collective mind. Puerile demands for asterisks abounded. Mitchell had the temerity to shoot free throws when the other team couldn’t stop him! He took a few bad shots in overtime with the game in hand to try and get to 70! Egads, where are my pearls??

Most fans aren’t like that, no. But a quick scan of any social media timeline shows too many people who are. Folks, please, I beg you once again.

Stop caveating greatness.

An infinitesimally slim percentage of players have a chance to make history. The few who stumble upon one have a right, nay, a responsibility, to chase it.

For comparison, Wilt Chamberlain’s record-setting 100-point game was hardly “ethical,” whatever that means. His team won that match 169-147, and he scored 31 in the final frame while playing all 48 minutes. I find it highly unlikely that those 31 were necessary to run out the clock on a beaten opponent. It’s obvious that Wilt (who may as well have invented stat hunting) wanted to get to triple digits.

Who cares? As sports fans, we should be living for these moments. Chamberlain’s line is legendary. The famous 81-point Kobe Bryant game, now moved to third on the list, is an NBA all-timer. Adebayo’s game will be, too.

Were there some shenanigans down the stretch? Of course. With two minutes-ish left and Bam in the mid-70s, the Heat began fouling to get the ball back quicker. The Wizards, not enough people are noting, tried fouling other players to ensure that Bam couldn’t get his opportunity (perhaps the best coaching of Brian Keefe’s career!), and the Heat’s Keshad Johnson responded with a purposeful missed free throw (a very good one, actually, although Adebayo didn’t secure it). Erik Spoelstra used a hopeless challenge to overturn a charging call, which predictably failed.

The Wizards double- and triple-teamed Adebayo, forcing him into several airballed jumpers, but they simply couldn’t get out of their own way. More accurately, they couldn’t get out of Bam’s way, as they sent him to the free-throw line approximately a million times. Adebayo hit some clutch ones down the stretch, running on fumes and the kind of adrenaline that only the chance at unexpected glory can provide.

You’d think he’d have urinated on a Kobe mural in Los Angeles.

The free-throw complaints, in particular, are so frustrating to me as a fan and analyst. As I wrote about Mitchell back in the day:

Donovan earned those free-throw attempts because the Bulls, quite clearly, couldn’t stop him. What happens when a guy scores at will? The other team starts whaling on him in frustration and desperation. This is a natural outcome, especially for a guy like Mitchell, who was living in the paint all game.

Ditto that for Bam. He didn’t get all of his 43 attempts in the last two minutes of the game. The Wizards were as effective on defense as my old toy army men, set up to be stomped on by the remote control Godzilla I got for Christmas one year.

Anyone complaining about the whistle didn’t watch the match. He had 31 points after one quarter, 43 points, his career high, at halftime, and 62, the Heat franchise record, after three quarters. The tanking, hapless Wizards had no answer for Adebayo anytime he got the ball in motion. He was the Juggernaut, unstoppable once he gained the tiniest skosh of momentum.

It was awe-inspiring, if not as aesthetically beautiful as Bryant’s 81 or even Mitchell’s 71. It was a superior physically dominating an inferior to a degree we’ve literally only seen one other time in NBA history.

And it was awesome.

You don’t have to say this was a better game than Bryant’s. It wasn’t! But don’t diminish Adebayo’s incredible accomplishment as somehow lesser, for any reason.

(Ironically, the biggest beneficiary of Adebayo’s scoring outburst may well be his All-Defensive Team case. I haven’t been seeing him in nearly enough All-Defensive conversations, and I suspect that this publicity will be great for him in that regard.)

“NBA fans don’t like anything about the NBA,” tortured poet Kevin Durant once proclaimed, and while I don’t think that’s true, it sure feels that way sometimes. Comparison is the thief of joy, and all that. Most of us enjoy the fact that we just saw real basketball history made, the kind you can tell your grandkids about and have them actually care.

Kobe Bryant’s 81-point box score still hangs in my high school bedroom, framed in cheap, cracked wood. I wasn’t a Lakers fan; if anything, I was a hater. But even as a teenager, I knew what I had witnessed.

I don’t have a paper newspaper subscription anymore, something I’ve never regretted more than I do now. But you can bet your ass (probably on FanDuel or Kalshi) that I’m gonna drive out to a store tomorrow and find one.