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Miami Heat star Bam Adebayo made NBA history on Tuesday night.
Adebayo scored 83 points while setting league marks for made and attempted free throws in a game for the Miami Heat in a 150-129 win over the Washington Wizards. It is the second-highest scoring game by a player ever, behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s famous 100-point game.
“An absolutely surreal night,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told reporters after the game.
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Adebayo started with a 31-point first quarter. He was up 43 at halftime, 62 by the end of the third quarter. And then came the fourth, as the milestones kept falling despite facing double, triple and what once appeared to be a quadruple team from a Wizards defense that kept sending him to the foul line.
He finished 20 of 43 from the field, 36 of 43 from the foul line, 7 for 22 from 3-point range.
After the game, he was seen in tears as he hugged his mother, Marilyn Blount, before leaving the floor after the game.
“Welp won’t have the highest career in the house anymore,” Adebayo’s girlfriend, four-time WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson, wrote on social media, “but at least it gives me something to go for.”
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Bam Adebayo #13 of the Miami Heat celebrates during the fourth quarter of the game against the Washington Wizards at the Kaseya Center on March 10, 2026 in Miami, Florida. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
The NBA’s previous best this season was 56, by Nikola Jokic for Denver against Minnesota on Christmas Eve. The last player to have 62 points through three quarters: one of Adebayo’s basketball heroes, Kobe Bryant, who had exactly that many through three quarters for the Los Angeles Lakers against Dallas on December 20, 2005.
He ended up passing Bryant for single-game scoring as well. Bryant’s career-best was 81 – a game that was tied for second on the NBA scoring list for two decades.
Adebayo scored 31 points in the opening quarter against the Wizards, breaking the Heat record for points in any quarter — and tying the team record for points in a first half before the second quarter even started.
He finished the first half with 43 points, a team record for any half and two points better than his previous career high – for a full game, that is – of 41, set on January 23, 2021 against Brooklyn.
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Adebayo’s season high entering Tuesday was 32. He matched that with a free throw with 5:53 left in the second quarter that broke the Heat first-half scoring record.
Adebayo’s 43-point first half was the NBA’s second-best in at least the last 30 seasons — dating back to the start of the digital play-by-play era that began in the 1996-97 season.
