Wilt’s 100 Point Game: Today in Sports History

On March 2nd, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, setting the NBA’s single-game scoring record that still stands today. The Warriors won 169-147. That season, Wilt averaged 50.4 points per game, and he had already broken the single-game record with 78 points earlier in the season. The all-time great entered halftime with a mere 41 points, with his team deciding to feed him in the second half. He dropped 28 and 31 in the final two quarters, all while being fouled hard by the Knicks. Even with free throws being one of the weakest parts of Chamberlain’s game, he hit 28 of 32 attempts thanks to a new, underhanded approach. The 169-147 final score still stands as the 9th most combined points scored in an NBA game, with 316. Along with a March 12th, 1970 matchup between the Cincinnati Royals and San Diego Rockets that also finished with 316 points, they are the only two games in the Top 10 to take place before the 1980’s. While no television broadcast exists and no video evidence of the game has yet to surface from any of the 4,124 attendees, the radio recording from the 4th quarter was added to the United States' National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress in 2016. No members of the New York press attended the game.