There’s Always A Way To Deny The Undeniable

Thirty years from now, or maybe three days from now given the culture's waning and highly variable sense of what is real and what isn't, we will be treated to someone postulating that Bam Adebayo actually didn't score 83 points in a game. Maybe it was all AI, or whatever acronym the post-AI generation will have to grapple with, or just an ayahuasca-fueled fever dream. Anyway, the supposed factual record is implausible—nobody gets to shoot 43 free throws, and nobody has 31 in the first quarter, and for sure no team would actually put out a lineup quite as bereft as the Washington Wizards did last night. Maybe people in the future will think this because the NBA fixes tanking for good in three months and teams being purposely abject for draft lottery purposes fades into feeling like a hallucination that never actually happened. Maybe people in the future will think this just because they are people. Hey, some people currently think that Wilt Chamberlain never scored 100 points because there isn't film to prove it, and Adebayo's game was only on NBA League Pass and in a couple of local media markets, which is the modern version of the same thing. But maybe the easiest way to deny it will be because, well, Bam Adebayo had 83 points? That cannot possibly be, and so by fiat or just through the sort of attrition that applies to things like this, it didn't. Tinfoil hats don't make themselves, but they are built for comfort. But for all the teethwringing and gnashing of hands over Adebayo's performance as it was, it was exactly as normal and forgettable as other mega-games. It came against a remarkably bad team, but so did Chamberlain's (real) century and so did Kobe Bryant's 81 and so did almost all the other 70-plus point performances in league history. Adebayo got a ridiculous 43 free throws, which is a league record, yes, but one that is never cited as any kind of actual achievement in any other context, unless you count the fact that most of the other high-free throw guys were deliberately fouled because they couldn't shoot free throws. He scored more than half his team's points, which is supposed to be really selfish to the point of being unethical, but also do you know who else did that in a game? Willie Burton and Michael Redd.