Over the years we’ve seen multiple high-scoring games by NBA players. Most of them come from the new generation of athletes like Luka’s 73-point games, Donovan Mitchell’s 71, Devin Booker’s 70, Joel Embiid also with 70 points and many more. However, some of these are performances from the current era from 2022 until the present as listed on the NBA official website. Amazing performances by these tremendously talented athletes of the past 3 National Basketball Association decades.
The game has evolved, and the game has become more exciting, enjoyable, and mainstream all around the world. The game of basketball was in drought during the 50s, 60s, and 70s due to the lack of competition between athletes. Until rising legends like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan arrived in the league. Over time we have watched some of the best scorers of our amazing sports, the most elite scorers that have been around are Kevin Durant, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, James Harden, Carmelo Anthony, and a couple more.
Comparatively, these players have scored over 20,000 points in their career including multiple 30, 40, 50 even 60-point games, such a hard thing to accomplish, but not a single one of these guys has reached the mark record held by the legend Wilt “the stilt” Chamberlain scoring 100 points in a game on March 2, 1962. Above all, around this time, the game was dying and not a single soul was watching televised basketball. The same teams won 5 championships in the last 7 years, and the same player had won all the awards, due to the lack of excitement. But since this game is so mentioned to this day, I kept thinking to myself, “How come no one speaks about this game?” if it is marked as “the best performance by an athlete of all time” stated ESPN. How can analytics be so sure of these stats knowing there is no footage/box score of it, and no athletes from back then can recall this game?
According to my research, there is no footage of the game and there were a few media members at the game and only proof of this game happening was over radio broadcasting but only audio recordings of the fourth quarter exist. In addition, there were 4,124 spectators at Hershey PA where the game was being played. There were no official photographers in Hershey PA, that night.
famous picture of Chamberlain holding the paper sheet with a 100 written by the former Warriors director Harvey Pollard and the picture was “taken by a fan”. When Wilt reached 80 points a former teammate of Wilt Al Attles explained, “We wanted Wilt to get the record, because we all liked him.” Attles himself set up an example by strictly passing the ball to Chamberlain so he could reach 100 points when he only had 77 with 5 minutes left in the game. The infamous conspiracy theory is that the NBA and the San
Francisco Warriors altered the stat sheet to attract more fans, and Wilt was the bait since the league height average was 6 feet around that time and Wilt was a one-of-one athlete listed at 7 feet tall, weighing almost 300 pounds. To add to this theory, broadcasters “misstated” the score, saying it was 169-150 and later it was “fixed” to 169-146 warriors winning the game. To culminate my conspiracy theory, the NBA and the San Francisco Warriors purposely targeted to score more points by themselves than anybody on the court to gain and attract more basketball fans. We’ve seen footage of Babe Ruth hitting homers, an anomaly who played back in 1914 to 1935 back when cameras weren’t fully developed as of now and even back when Chamberlain played. The NBA knows to not try to rig such a thing because of how developed the new generation of players are.
