There’s irony in the fact that no video is known to exist of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game for the Philadelphia Warriors on March 2, 1962.
Nobody can watch it now.
Nobody has seen anything like it, either. And probably never will.
Wednesday marks the 60th anniversary of the greatest scoring effort in NBA history — 36 field goals, 28 free throws, 100 points for Chamberlain, in the Warriors’ 169-147 win over the New York Knicks in a game played before about 4,000 people in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It might be the closest thing the NBA has to a single-game record that will never be broken.
Chamberlain, for the record, disagreed with that sentiment.
“I think it can be broken,” he said in 1987, around the 25th anniversary of the historic night.
Not yet. Not even close.
Kobe Bryant scored 81 points for the Los Angeles Lakers one night against Toronto, the closest anyone has ever come to Chamberlain’s mark. David Thompson scored 73, Elgin Baylor and David Robinson each scored 71, and Devin Booker had a 70-point game.
That’s it. Think about it: No player has gotten closer than 19 points to 100, and only five have come within 30 points. Even in this era in which 3-pointers are all the rage — remember, they were about two decades from existence when Chamberlain set the record — hardly anyone has gotten within 30 points of history.
Booker got his 70-point game in 2017. Carmelo Anthony and Stephen Curry each had a 62-point effort in the last decade. James Harden has hit the 60-point mark four times, Damian Lillard three times, while Klay Thompson and LeBron James each got there once.
A 60-piece, that’s obviously huge.
But it’s also nowhere near the record.
Break down the numbers, and it starts to make sense why nobody has come
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