SGA to break Wilt record: Thunder star's historic feat, by the numbers - ESPN

On Nov. 1, 2024, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 30 points in a 137-114 Oklahoma City Thunder win in Portland. It wasn't an especially notable performance at the time; Gilgeous-Alexander had averaged 30.1 points per game the previous season en route to an MVP runner-up finish.

Now, 16 months later, that game carries great historical importance, as it was the start of a 126-game odyssey for a player who has since won the regular-season MVP award, been named Finals MVP and tied a 63-year-old record.

On Thursday night against the Boston Celtics (9:30 p.m. ET, Prime Video), Gilgeous-Alexander will attempt to score at least 20 points for the 127th game in a row, dating back to that night in Portland. If he does, he'll pass the great Wilt Chamberlain for the longest such streak in NBA history.

It's a fitting record, based in historic consistency, for the man who once declared, «My whole life is consistent, everything I do.»

To commemorate that consistency, here are the 20 wildest, most extreme and most impressive stats about Gilgeous-Alexander's historic 20-point streak:

1. The first surprise about Gilgeous-Alexander's accomplishment is that he even came close to Chamberlain's record. Nobody else had done so previously; before SGA, the second-longest 20-point streak in NBA history belonged to Chamberlain himself, at 92 games. There's a reason Gilgeous-Alexander considers Chamberlain «almost like a mythical creature,» because his statistical feats were so singular.

Oscar Robertson's 79-gamer was in third place — which means that for all of NBA history until this season, Chamberlain was the only player to push his streak as long as the equivalent of an entire season. And even Robertson's streak brought him only 63% of the way to