Bam Adebayo’s 83 has been a litmus test for basketball fans. Some have celebrated it as the incredible achievement it was, while still acknowledging the absurd circumstances around it, namely the fact that the Wizards are embarrassing to begin with and fully in tank mode, and that the Heat went above and beyond by fouling and missing on purpose to get Bam as high as he could go.
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Others, whether they be Kobe stans or just run-of-the-mill haters, want an asterisk on Bam’s night, or at least to never hear about it again. Iman Shumpert falls in that camp after he took Bam to task for bringing it up after the Heat lost to the Lakers a week ago.
“Don’t bring up the 80 no more,” he said. “You was wrong for bringing up the 80. You don’t bring that up. That was a regular season game against a tanking team. You murder them, and then you walk off … Don’t talk about it no more, fam, ’cause now it look weird. Now you ’bout to make it to where I don’t like the 83 no more, I’m dead serious.”
On last night’s episode of Nightcap, Shannon Sharpe, Tracy McGrady and Chad Johnson responded to Shumpert, and let’s just say they were on Team Bam.
“F that, I’m talking about it forever,” Sharpe said after recounting what Shumpert said. “As a matter of fact, I’m changing my name — Mr. 83.”
“People out here are crazy, dawg,” McGrady said as he shook his head in bewilderment. “That’s 83 points in an NBA game, my dude, against NBA players that are making millions of dollars. We can’t do that,” he sighed!
Johnson, who once infamously changed his last name to Ochocinco in honor of his jersey number, said, “I’m gonna talk,” if he did something similar and posted 300 receiving yards in an NFL game. “It’d be crazy, I might change my last name to 300, too.”
To put Bam’s performance into perspective, he scored 31 in the first quarter of that game. That’s more than Shumpert ever had in an entire game in his 10-year NBA career (his career high was 27). Shumpert played just 14 games in the 2017-18 season, and he only scored 62 points in total.
If you score 83 points in a game, you get to talk about it, at least for a few weeks, if not forever. Let’s be real here. Shumpert never even got a third of Bam’s total in a game, so who is he to tell him to pipe down? Let the man enjoy his achievement.
