The Wizards Deserve This Humiliation

Bam Adebayo scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards Tuesday night. The Wizards spent a portion of the fourth quarter of the game selling out anything recognizable as a basketball principle in an effort to prevent Adebayo from breaking a scoring record. They sent panicked triple- and even quadruple-teams, they warped and broke their defensive shape to attempt exaggerated ball-denial schemes, and they finally resorted to intentionally fouling Adebayo's teammates. What they didn't do, because they couldn't, because as a team-building strategy it opposes their organizational goals, was put better players onto the floor. They simply do not have better players. They do not have combinations of players available to prevent a motivated opponent from scoring 83 points. The version of basketball played by the Heat in order to facilitate Adebayo's record was like something out of a fever nightmare, but also: Miami won the game, and scored 150 points, and beat the Wizards by 21. This was accomplished—the second-most points the Heat have scored in a regular-season game in their history—despite all but a couple of Miami's starting-grade players missing the game due to injuries and rest. Looking at their lineups, it's hard to know where shots were supposed to come from, if not from Adebayo. After the game, Wizards head coach Brian Keefe was begrudging in his assessment of Adebayo's performance. "You've got to give him credit in the first half, he shot the ball terrific, he scored the ball really well," said an affectless, dead-eyed Keefe, a placeholder non-entity who has the unbearably miserable job of keeping a bunch of mismatched bozos motivated for several more weeks of this shit without even the slightest remote chance of any tangible reward. "He came out and had a little bit in the third, too, but they obviously kept him in the game and there were a lot of fouls called, you know, 16 free throws in the fourth quarter. Just trying to take the ball out of his hands, he still got some free throws 40 feet from the rim. I can't explain some of those calls. That's all I've got to say on that."