Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat has surpassed a mark by the great Kobe Bryant, becoming the second player to score more points in a single NBA game, 83 points, surpassing Kobe's record of 81. It happened in a 126-129 victory over Washington Wizards, in which he scored 20 out of 43 field attempts, and scored 36 free throws out of 43 attempts.
He is only behind the 100 points scored by Wilt Chamberlain in 1962 for the Philadelphia Warriors, a mark possibly unreachable. The way Adebayo - whose previous high score record was 41 points, and wasn't picked for the All-Star last month - achieved the record, however, has been controversial. With the match already decided with comfortable lead, and Adebayo at 43 points in halftime, his teammates "conspired to put him in the books", as NBA's own reporter Shaun Powell said, fouling on purpose to get the ball back to Adebayo as much as possible.
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Heat manager Erik Spoelstra also joined the fun. "The last six minutes of the third quarter and the entire fourth quarter I was a fan. This one came out of nowhere. This one snuck up on us. Once it kept on going, we knew we could be part of something special."
Elsewhere in NBA last night, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander also tied a mark set by Wilt Chamberlain, scoring over 20 points in 12 straight games. He scored 35, including a tiebreaker 3-pointer three seconds before the end, in a 129-126 win for Oklahoma City Thunder against Denver Nuggets. He is one match away of surpassing the record set by Chamberlain between 1961 and 1963, which included the famous 100-point game.