Basketball · 1962 · Hershey, USA
The 100-Point Game
In a small Pennsylvania arena, with no television cameras present, Wilt Chamberlain scores 100 points in an NBA game, and nobody since has come within 18 of it.
100
Points scored
Warriors 169-147 Knicks
Result
28 of 32
Free throws made
The Philadelphia Warriors hosted the New York Knicks on 2 March 1962 at the Hershey Sports Arena, a neutral-site fixture of the kind the NBA then scattered around Pennsylvania. Wilt Chamberlain was already the league's dominant scorer. He started fast, never slowed, and had 41 points by halftime.
Through the third and fourth quarters the Knicks worked out what was happening and began fouling his teammates to keep the ball out of his hands, and Philadelphia kept feeding it straight back to him. He finished on 100 points, 36 of 63 from the field and 28 of 32 from the free-throw line, ordinarily the weak part of his game, in a 169-147 Warriors win.
There is no footage of it. The game was not televised, and what survives is a partial radio broadcast that a college student happened to record off-air. Kobe Bryant's 81-point game in 2006 is the closest anyone has come in the six decades since.
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