The USA men’s basketball team cruised into the knockout rounds of the Olympic basketball tournament on Saturday, beating Puerto Rico in their final game of the group stage by 19. While they got off to a shaky start, they cruised to a win thanks to a big performance from Anthony Edwards, who put up 26 points in the win.
As tends to happen in the Olympics, it was the third straight game for Team USA with a different leading scorer, as with the depth of talent on the roster we often see different players taking the lead on any given night. After leading the way against South Sudan with 18 points, Bam Adebayo had much more pedestrian game against Puerto Rico, doing a little bit of everything with three points, five rebounds, three assists, and two steals. That’s certainly not a bad stat line, especially since Team USA wasn’t asking Adebayo to carry the offensive load, but it wasn’t really one to write home about.
Despite that, the Miami Heat tweeted out Bam’s stat line with a bunch of fire emojis, hyping up his perfectly solid outing, and the star center couldn’t help but poke some fun at his NBA squad tweeting out his “quadruple single” performance.
In early August, NBA team social media accounts are going to look for any opportunity for a post, and having your guy in the Olympics is your best chance for some easy content. The problem is, with how restrictive the Olympics and NBC are about highlights on social media, you have to hope an official account posts something involving your player or else you just have photos and stat lines. In this case, the stat line wasn’t all that impressive, even if he did perfectly fine in a win, and Adebayo had to call them out for trying to make his performance seem better than it really was.