More on (what else?) 83
How unlikely was it? One measure: Check out how far down the list Bam Adebayo was in terms of career-high games before he shook up the entire NBA by shredding the Wizards
It was a common reaction in circulation Tuesday night when Bam Adebayo was in the midst of assembling a thoroughly unforeseen 83-point game that still has the whole league talking (and arguing):
How many current NBA players would you have named before Bam if someone asked you to predict a player capable of topping Kobe Bryant's 81 points in January 2006?
The best guesstimate?
Using past performance as a literal guide ... it would have been 97.
Adebayo's previous career peak before the hapless Washington Wizards came to Miami this week was 41 points. So ...
Utilizing the admittedly simple formula of highlighting every active player who boasted a better career-best game than 41 — as confirmed via the database maintained by our tireless researcher pal Keerthika Uthayakumar — we can pass along that there were 97 such active players in the NBA as of Thursday.
Ninety-seven!
We repeat: Before Bam's 83, there were 97 active players in a league that currently features 524 players (including two-ways) who had scored at least 42 points in a regular-season game.
It's obviously less than scientific to take this approach and make past point totals the ultimate standard for probability in this case ... but I found it somewhat stunning that nearly 100 players in today's NBA had posted a gaudier career night than Adebayo before Tuesday's South Beach proceedings.
You can see for yourself by scrolling through the whole Keerthika-assembled list below. We stretched it to 107 players in the end to include the nine other active players who have scored 41 in a regular-season game to match Adebayo’s previous best. It’s a group that now includes Chicago’s Matas Buzelis, who was rumbling for 41 points of his own in an overtime win over Golden State on the same night that Bam somehow found a way to get us talking about Kobe, Wilt Chamberlain, tanking, ethical basketball and asterisks all at the same time.
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The Full List!
The incomparable Uthayakumar really did it. I asked if it was possible to assemble a readable list of every player in today's NBA who has scored at least 41 points in a regular-season game … since, again, that was Adebayo's previous high game until Eighty-Three.
Check out Keerthika's handiwork below — with a major assist from Datawrapper — and take note of the option in the top right corner to seamlessly toggle between Page 1 and 2 to see all 106 players and their career nights in addition to Adebayo.
Have Your Say …
This space is usually reserved for sharing Substack Notes declarations, but Adebayo's scoring outburst generated so much passionate and diverse reaction that we devoted a separate thread to it in Substack Chat.
Are you cool with Bam supplanting Kobe as the highest single-game scorer of the modern era behind Wilt’s 100 in March 1962? If not … why?
Click and have your say here:
What would the NBA officially consider the "modern era"? Is it even an official designation? MLB considers the modern era to begin in 1901. So would it be 1977, when the leagues merged?
that 97 player list is incredible. so many memories of watching "that game"