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<\/p>\nMIAMI \u2014 The faux pain began midway into the third quarter.<\/p>\n
After yet another free throw from Bam Adebayo, Jamie Carrig turned to the fellow Miami Heat staffer seated next to him.<\/p>\n
Carrig\u2019s hand was cramping. Or so he claimed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need a reliever,\u201d he joked to Heat media relations veteran Rob Wilson.<\/p>\n
Carrig has been Miami\u2019s official scorer for the past four seasons and has worked on the team\u2019s stats crew since the organization\u2019s inception in 1988. But in 38 years, he had never seen what was before him a week ago. Save for the lucky few present for Wilt Chamberlain\u2019s trek to triple digits, no one had.<\/p>\n
When Adebayo dropped a historic 83 points on March 10, it was Carrig\u2019s job to log each one in his scorebook.<\/p>\n
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All the 2-pointers. All the long balls. And, most strenuous, all of Adebayo\u2019s record-setting 43 free-throw attempts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to make sure to hydrate,\u201d Carrig joked while recalling the experience to The Athletic.<\/p>\n
Even during the digital age, an old-school tradition remains at each NBA game. An official scorer locks in at a sideline table to track each basket and each foul by hand. Carrig most often is that man for the Heat, taking over first-string duties after Miami\u2019s longtime official scorer, Peter Abraham, retired in 2022.<\/p>\n
Every once in a while, Carrig will shift to another job at the scorer\u2019s table. The Heat will shuffle their stats crew around, sometimes out of mere superstition. Carrig could move to another statistical assignment for one evening. On other nights, he might operate the clock.<\/p>\n
Wilson, his seat neighbor, will occasionally threaten to bench Carrig if the Heat have a bad night. Clearly, the official scorer bears the most blame for any loss. But Carrig, as he was for Adebayo\u2019s breakout night, the second-highest-scoring performance in NBA history, most often takes the book.<\/p>\n
The job entails two requirements: attention to detail and tiny handwriting. Carrig\u2019s scorecard is lined with green boxes that divide the first, second, third and fourth quarters. Along with fouls, he must track every made shot per player per quarter.<\/p>\n
If someone sinks a field goal, he delineates the difference with a little No. 2 or No. 3. Free-throw attempts are circles; makes get a tiny \u201cX\u201d scribed in the middle of them.<\/p>\n
Last Tuesday, Carrig doodled 43 of those circles for Adebayo. If carpal tunnel ever develops, he might have a case in court against the center who set the record for single-game free-throw attempts.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\n Jamie Carrig\u2019s official scoring of Bam Adebayo\u2019s 83-point night for the Miami Heat. (Fred Katz \/ The Athletic)<\/p>\n
\u201c(I got) no ice bath afterwards,\u201d Carrig said. \u201cBut I thought about putting (my hand) in the ice cream cooler in the back where we have our dining.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baseball might inspire the most romanticized handwritten scorekeeping of any sport, but in basketball, the tradition is just as vital. Every NBA team has its own version of Carrig, some who have been in the role for years. Abraham scored Heat games for more than three decades.<\/p>\n
Each person with the gig has his or her own quirks.\u00a0Carrig will color-code his quarters, using a different pen to mark each one. For now, the first quarter is blue; the second is purple. The third is a lighter blue, and the fourth is red. If the Heat go on a losing streak, he\u2019ll switch up the order. Sometimes, when he\u2019s feeling particularly risqu\u00e9, he\u2019ll add a new color to the mix.<\/p>\n
The handwritten book isn\u2019t some relic, either. In 2026, every statistic, especially points and fouls, is readily available on the internet within seconds of occurring.<\/p>\n
And yet, Carrig\u2019s role still has utility.\u00a0Carrig\u2019s right hand is a real-time backup.<\/p>\n
For example, in 2018, a power outage knocked out the clocks and stat monitors in a game between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Sacramento Kings. The Golden 1 Center had air conditioning and light. The electric doors worked. But resources resembled those of a high school game.<\/p>\n
Whatever online box score fans wanted to use showed dashes across it. Arena workers had to set up temporary clocks on either baseline, so players could see how much time remained in any possession. The only way for players, coaches or referees to know how many fouls someone had committed or if a team had entered the bonus was to check with the official scorer.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo document everything, to do it by hand, it\u2019s still important to do,\u201d Carrig said.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s needed on normal nights, too.\u00a0When the Heat\u2019s public address voice, Michael Baiamonte, needs to announce foul totals, he\u2019ll check with Carrig, not with the computer. Of course, that means Carrig\u2019s notes must be legible, which Adebayo put to the test last week.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t even the free throws that took up the most space.\u00a0The Heat\u2019s captain sank 10 field goals during a 31-point first quarter. That\u2019s when Carrig knew he was witnessing greatness, not just because of the basketball in front of him but also because of that teensy box stuffed with enough digits to form a phone number.<\/p>\n
For the first time he could remember, Carrig scored a quarter where his handwriting, specifically the markings for Adebayo\u2019s first-quarter baskets, spilled into another column. That\u2019s when he knew Adebayo\u2019s performance, and this otherwise simple sheet of paper, which Carig will have to submit to the NBA when the league recoups all 30 scorebooks at the end of the season, would be, as he put it, \u201creally, really special.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was there writing stuff in the book and thinking, \u2018This is history that\u2019s happening,\u201d Carrig said. \u201cIt\u2019s surreal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2014 The faux pain began midway into the third quarter. After yet another free throw from Bam…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":194908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,2490,124,2295],"class_list":["post-194907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-heat","tag-miami-news","tag-nba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}