Bam Adebayo was filled with rage.
It was the morning of Game 3 of the 2022 Eastern Conference finals in Boston, less than 48 hours after the Heat center had scored only six points in a 25-point loss to the Celtics at home. His Game 2 performance had invited another round of his critics’ favorite question: Is Bam aggressive enough? Ever since Adebayo became a starter in ’19, the expectations for him as an offensive force have grown. When he signed a max contract extension in November ’20, it seemingly added pressure for him to produce more points.
Adebayo was not only upset with how he’d played in Game 2, he had also been gassed up by his big brother, Udonis Haslem, after the performance. As Adebayo recalls, Haslem had a conversation with him the following night about Bam envisioning the type of showing he wanted to have in Game 3. The two watched “about 10 seconds of film” before Haslem and Adebayo had a grown-man conversation about the latter’s responsibilities.
Haslem’s message to Bam was simple.
“We go as he goes,” Haslem says. “He’s the engine that drives this thing. Without him, we’re a shell of ourselves. When he’s the best version of himself on both ends of the floor, we’re the best basketball team in the world.”
Adebayo took it all in, the motivation carrying over to game day.
“I was just mad all day,” Adebayo says. “Ask anybody. From shootaround until the clock hit zero. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know if it was all the f---ing green. I just found something to be mad at. I was pissed.”
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With his anger fueling him, Adebayo responded with perhaps the best game of his career: 31 points, 10 rebounds, six assists and four steals in a Heat win.
The outside concern about Adebayo has not necessarily been whether he’s capable of the offensive heroics he showed in that Game 3. It’s whether he can do it consistently.
Why doesn’t Bam shoot more? Why isn’t Bam scoring 25 a night?
These are questions Adebayo is aware of.
These are questions that in part fueled what he worked on after the Heat lost to the Celtics in seven games.
These are also questions the Heat find irrelevant regarding the impact Adebayo has on their franchise.
“Each year he has gotten significantly better,” coach Erik Spoelstra says. “And I think what is really special is Bam has put himself in the conversation to be the most versatile, best all-around player in the league. So the challenge is to quiet all the opinions, expectations and noise from out there.”
That Bam is even experiencing pressure to become the kind of scorer that earns him the “pure hooper” label from midrange J-loving social media accounts is a testament to his development as a player.
Adebayo entered the league in 2017 as an unknown commodity, an athletic curiosity who—by his own admission—could only get on the floor during his rookie year because of his energy and defense.
Now, few players are asked to do more on a nightly basis than Adebayo. A partial list from Spoelstra includes orchestrating a top-flight defense, dominating in multiple defensive coverages, guarding every position on the floor, holding teammates accountable to defending at a high level, passing, scoring, facilitating, screening, rolling hard to the rim and offensive rebounding. Spo calls Bam “the great decathlete,” saying he doesn’t have to be the best in any one thing, but challenging him to be great in every facet.
“He can check a lot of boxes on the menu, offensively,” Spo says. “He can initiate, he can be a closing guy, he can be everything in-between. And how he can really impact winning is playing to all those strengths and not just the one everybody wants him to.”
Adebayo has responded. In any given game, you can see him setting stonewall screens for Kyle Lowry or Tyler Herro, running handoffs with Max Strus, finding a cutting Caleb Martin from the elbow, catching lobs after setting a pindown, running a fastbreak, or switching onto a perimeter scorer.
And of course, you’ll see him put the ball through the net, more than ever before. Bam was determined to improve as a scorer in the summer. Whether he was at home or on vacation, he prioritized getting in multiple workouts a day. His trainer, Ronnie Taylor, says his summer was shot because Adebayo kept bugging him to get out of bed at 5:30 in the morning so they could get in the gym.
Adebayo demands improvement from himself. In 2019, he made a bet with Heat icon Dwyane Wade that he would average 16 points, 10 rebounds and five assists a game. He met those benchmarks en route to the 2020 Finals. Before this season, Adebayo wanted to average 20-plus points, 10-plus rebounds and five-plus assists, and shoot at least 80% from the free throw line. After a slow start to the season, here are Adebayo’s averages for the month of November, during which time the Heat have been beset by injuries: 22.3 points, 10.3 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 87.9% from the free throw line on over five attempts a game.
As Taylor would describe it, Adebayo is playing with more of a “f--- it” attitude, echoing his Game 3 performance against Boston. Taylor says to watch film of that playoff game, one shouldn’t focus on Bam, but on his defenders, who didn’t know how to stop him because he was “giving them everything.”
It’s an apt way to describe how Adebayo is scoring this season as well. He’s improved his scoring average every year of his career, and for the first time he’s surpassing the 20-point threshold. Bam is one of only four players averaging at least 20 points, nine rebounds and three assists while shooting at least 50% from the field—the others being Joel Embiid, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokić.
And perhaps most importantly, Adebayo is showing growth in creating his own shot. He has the highest usage rate and the highest rate of unassisted field goals in his entire career—43% of Bam’s makes are unassisted, a higher mark than Karl-Anthony Towns, Anthony Davis, Zion Williamson and Embiid. (He’s only slightly behind Jayson Tatum’s 43.3%.) His isolations are up, both in volume and efficiency. Twenty-one games into the season, Adebayo already has three 30-point games, only two fewer than all of last year.
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Bam is doing most of his work in the paint. He’s one of only six players shooting at least 60% on at least 10 shots a night within 10 feet of the hoop. He’s also averaging 1.16 points per possession as a roll man, better than the likes of Giannis, Embiid and Deandre Ayton. He has a variety of finishes inside, between dunks, short hooks and push shots.
If Bam has a signature move, it’s a pull-up jumper he employs in the paint. It can look awkward when he’s rising up from an area where many players typically prefer to launch floaters, but his high-release point and soft touch are becoming an issue for defenses.
Taylor says Bam can still score more, mentioning the duo worked hard on his three-point shooting over the summer. Adebayo has shown a slight willingness to launch more from deep this year, though he hasn’t made a single one of his eight attempts, which is two more than he took in 2021–22. (Adebayo says another one of his goals is to shoot over 30% from three.)
“He has every tool, but he’s such a team player that sometimes it works against him,” Taylor says. “He’s unselfish to a fault. It’s what makes him special. But everybody that watches him in the summer knows him as Pickup Bam, because he’s like a one-man wrecking crew.”
The increase in scoring hasn’t come at the expense of Adebayo’s Defensive Player of the Year–worthy defense, either. Bam made it clear throughout the summer he was disappointed in not winning the award last season, and he hasn’t let that aspect of his game slip. Despite numerous injuries to key players (Adebayo, Lowry, Herro and Jimmy Butler have played only eight games together), the Heat remain elite defensively when Bam is on the floor. They’ve mixed in a few coverages—an incredibly heavy amount of zone, dropping Adebayo in pick-and-rolls—to account for personnel changes, as well as to keep Bam involved in the action.
Due to his prowess as a switch defender, teams are isolating against Bam at a noticeably lower rate than in the past. Per NBA.com, from 2020 to ’22 Adebayo guarded isolations for at least 10% of his defensive possessions every season, in large part due to the Heat’s switch-heavy scheme. So far this season, he’s guarding isos only 6.2% of the time, as even many of the game’s best perimeter scorers have not welcomed the matchup.
Adebayo would like for Pickup Bam to come out more and admits to bumping heads with Spo on occasion, a healthy tension borne out of Adebayo’s desire to do more for his team. He remembers during his rookie year his coaches being surprised he could dribble so well, and how he had to advocate for himself to be able to handle the ball. These days, the challenge is incorporating what he’s added from the summer into the team’s offense.
“I have to collaborate with Spo,” Adebayo says. “Because he knows I’m ambitious. I want to have a bigger load. I want to have a bigger responsibility on this team, and not just on the defensive end.”
But Spoelstra is committed to the bigger picture. In fact, if anyone is nonplussed about Adebayo’s increased scoring output, it’s probably Spo.
“Really manipulating the game offensively and thinking the game offensively, that’s much more complex than saying, ‘Hey, I gotta be aggressive and try to score 40,’” he says, adding that he enjoys the process of adding more to Bam’s plate, knowing he won’t be frustrated when challenged to do even more.
“When you’re dealing with somebody who is so desperate to win like Bam, you can figure out all the little nuances to how he can impact the game. The harder part is finding someone who really cares about winning.”
Spoelstra is clearly protective of Adebayo. He’s made deflecting questions about his scoring output in press conferences an art form. And it’s clear he wants the focus on Bam’s game to be about not one column in the box score, but the totality of what he provides the franchise.
And that extends off the floor.
Adebayo is seen within the franchise as a torch carrier for—skip this next phrase if you’re a fan of a conference rival—Heat culture. Spoelstra smiles wide when he describes the excitement of developing Bam from a teenager to the player he is now. He beams with pride when he describes Adebayo’s desire to conquer, his ambition to improve, and the way he cares about winning deep down in his soul.
“This guy embodies so many things we truly care about in our organization,” Spoelstra says. “We have an opportunity to develop him from 19 years old to a UD or a Dwyane [Wade], somebody who’s here for a long time and sets the standard for our entire building.”
Even with the presence of a superstar like Butler or a champion like Lowry, Adebayo is clearly positioned to be the next face of the Heat’s gritty persona.
Adebayo enjoys a particularly close relationship with the current face of the Heat’s attitude in Haslem. Most would describe them as brothers, constantly laughing or arguing in between going at each other’s throats in fierce games of one-on-one. Haslem is whom Adebayo leans on for advice and credits with much of his growth as a leader.
“UD has picked me up so many times,” Adebayo says. “It’s ridiculous how much he impacts winning without even being on the court. He’s one of those people that’s going to sit you down and be completely honest.”
And Haslem has genuine affection for Bam. UD says he admires his young teammate’s relationship with his mother after having lost his own 12 years ago. Haslem says before he ever approached Adebayo on a leadership level or offered advice for his career, he made it a point to establish their friendship, growing close not only with Bam, but the people in his life.
“That’s one of my favorite things to observe is the genuine brotherhood,” Spoelstra says. “The mentor-mentee who is training the mentee to become a mentor. If you think about that and step back, it’s a special relationship. It’s what we’d hoped for but didn’t know with a young Bam.
“You treasure these kinds of relationships, because you try to cultivate it but you can’t force it. It’s pure, and it will transcend this game.”
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The game is still of utmost importance to Bam and the Heat, and so far this year, the team has been streaky. Injuries have played a role en route to a 10–11 start, the team under .500 even amid Adebayo’s personal success. While the Heat’s defense has become a top-10 unit after a shaky start to the season, the offense as a whole has struggled with key cogs like Herro and Butler missing significant chunks.
Miami already entered the season with a level of skepticism after a quiet offseason, though they did return much of the roster of last year’s No. 1 seed in the East. Some pundits believe they shouldn’t be favored to win their division, while others scoff at the idea of them making it back to the Finals.
“I feel like everybody, no matter if it was said on IG, Snapchat, the cookout, whatever it may be, everybody gathered a motivational stitch. And it was like, ’Nah, I got something for you this season,’ ” Adebayo says. “And for the guys who people don’t talk about, I feel like they’re the same way. Sixty percent of our team is undrafted. When we practice, Coach will say, ‘This team has this many draft picks, this many lottery picks,’ and dudes undrafted take it personally.”
As for the bitter playoff loss at the hands of the rival Celtics last season, it was ultimately a learning experience for Bam. The up-and-down nature of his play taught him to block out the noise, especially when people go “apes--- crazy” about his performance after a loss. Although that hasn’t stopped him from keeping track of what people say about his team.
“It’s been crazy to hear people bash us the way they do and be wrong so many times,” Adebayo says, his rage once again coming back to the surface. “For us, it’s motivation. We’re gonna keep riding this way. And you know, a chip make a monster.”
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