Beyond the benchmark
Bam Adebayo's 83-point feat, Kobe Bryant's clinging weight, and what happens when we stop living on nostalgia?
Who do we deem worthy of our nostalgia?
After all the quibbling about intentional fouls tarnishing the high shine of the number, that he was cheating the game by breaking its unwritten rules, or that Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra should’ve taken him out when he hit 70 points, that’s the through-line of Bam Adebayo’s 83-point scoring performance this week.
All of the criticism against Adebayo’s record — even the blowback I’ve seen from people by calling it a “record” (Wilt Chamberlain holds that at 100 points, its lore and ubiquity equally present given that scrawling a number on a plain sheet of paper is the first thing any player who notches a high score does) — is rooted in it. Everything from the game itself, against an actively tanking Wizards team, not being competitive enough to make 83 points meaningful, to the wish that it should’ve been someone we associate with more with shooting, like Luka Doncic (funny but predictable, I have seen no wishes for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander).
Of that nostalgia, I’d say about 80% of it is rooted in lore for and of the late Kobe Bryant.
It’s where the calls for Adebayo to stop before he hit 81 points, and where the criticisms of the way Adebayo got his last nine to 13 (no one can agree, because it’s arbitrary) points come from. It’s also in complaints about the competitive dearth of the matchup. It’s why people wanted it to be Doncic (a Laker), and it’s unmistakably why Lakers fans, watching their own game at home, booed when their in-arena announcer delivered the news, calling it a “melancholy footnote in NBA history” in the same tone you’d deliver the most tragic news imaginable. The Lakers have a house band, I’m surprised one of the horns didn’t start bleating out “Taps”.
It’s impossible to have a normal conversation about Bryant amidst NBA fans and media (and the latter because their fandom, however latent, is what contextualizes the discussion). The nostalgia is so heady, so emotional, so pressingly present — both in that it has never diminished and feels perpetually fresh — that it doesn’t function the way normal retrospection does. Less than reminiscing, it’s a nostalgia that actively seeks to freeze a section of NBA history as-is and views any encroachment to one singular collective memory, one version of history, as a threat. Regular basketball nostalgia is annoying, but it’s malleable, morphing to absorb new feats, records and names. Bryant’s brand is brittle.
It also overlaps with the contemporary game at many more junctures.
Everything from “the right kind” of competitive mindset, to players treating themselves as brands, to footwork (even the shoes the majority of current players wear when doing that footwork), to our notion of root for-able villains, and the wilful amnesia by fans, media and the NBA to the bodily and psychic harm inflicted by athletes off-court when they happen to be entertaining to watch on it — it all stems from Bryant. He’s in the water, air, atmosphere; the very framework of the league down to its bedrock.
