Thirty years from now, or perhaps three days from now, given the decline of the culture and our highly variable sense of what is real and what is not, we will have someone assuming that Bam Adebayo didn’t actually score 83 points in the game. Maybe it was all AI, maybe it was just an acronym that the post-AI generation would have to grapple with, or maybe it was just an ayahuasca-induced fever dream. In any case, the supposed actual records are unreliable. No one shoots 43 free throws, no one shoots 31 free throws in the first quarter, and no team will actually come out of the lineup like the Washington Wizards did last night. Maybe people in the future will think this because the NBA completely fixing tanking teams in three months and being intentionally pessimistic for draft lottery purposes feels like a hallucination that didn’t actually happen. Maybe people in the future will think this way because they’re just people.
Hello, some people now believe that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points because there is no film to prove it, and Adebayo’s games were only available on NBA League Pass and a few local media markets. But perhaps the easiest way to deny it is because Bam Adebayo scored 83 points. That can’t be possible. So it wasn’t through the kind of attrition that applies to fiat money and things like that. Although tinfoil hats do not make themselves, they are made for comfort.
But despite the gnashing of teeth and gnashing of hands over Adebayo’s performance, it was just as normal and forgettable as any other mega game. That was against a notably bad team, but so was Chamberlain’s (actual) century, so was Kobe Bryant’s 81, and so was almost every other 70-plus point score in league history. Adebayo hit a ridiculous 43 free throws. This is a league record. But it’s a record that’s never been mentioned as an actual accomplishment in any other context, other than the fact that most of the other players who shot a lot of free throws were intentionally fouled because they couldn’t. He scored more than half of the team’s points, which I think is so selfish that it’s almost unethical, but you know who else has done that in the game? Willie Burton and Michael Redd.
But none of that really matters here. Like all other historical facts, Adebayo’s accomplishments will ultimately be up for debate. Because that’s what people do with facts. Even before every news article is consciously dipped into an acid bath of algorithmic reality distortion, the concrete becomes abstract over time as partisan, oppositional, or otherwise unpleasant instincts overwhelm reality. What clearly happened raises the following objection: In reality it wasn’t like that.Then all you have to do is find someone who can benefit from saying it happened. The religious organization of Covestans is already claiming that Adebayo committed a crime against history by making the last 2 free throws or the 14th before that while counting down to the 4th quarter, and the crime against history is ultimately becoming a concept that is not history at all.
Moreover, it’s very likely that someone else will get an 84 soon. Adebayo is not an offensive outlier here. He’s a great player, but the main criticism of his impressive all-around game is that he isn’t assertive enough, and he may not have the most notable offensive history among the 40 NBA players who have even scored 60 points in a game. If the future screamer feels like doing so, that alone would be enough to nullify his accomplishments. You can construct a perfectly reasonable argument as to why you choose to ignore the achievement, even if it doesn’t completely deny the obvious. The distance between that and eventually denying it completely can be crossed over time.
And herein lies the low thrill of not admitting that something has happened that you don’t like. This is why the Chamberlain C-note argument has always been so annoying in the 3D world. There’s even a saying that “he was playing against plumbers and bricklayers,” which makes the connection quite easily to the 1962 Knicks team on which he scored 100 points. And on defense, unlike the Wizards last night, the 1962 Knicks weren’t prevented from winning by management’s orders. They were just organically terrible.
But don’t worry about that. Whatever your reasons for criticizing Bam Adebayo as a worthless holder of a record that isn’t actually a record, you may end up embroiled in an argument that outright denies it. In a decade or so, if the current trend of subjectivity continues, there will easily be a transition to “that never happened.” The ease of that depends on the person making the argument valuing comfort over being right, but the trend lines are also pretty clear. Anyone who feels they have to discount the validity of Bam Adebayo’s nearly 12 dozen last night should look inward, but just wait a bit. In the end, no one will believe what happened. Because that’s what we decided to be. Bam Adebayo? After all, we’ve never heard of him.
