Every 70-point game in NBA history (through March 2026)

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Sixteen times in 79 NBA seasons a player has scored 70 or more points in a single game. Eleven different players have done it. Wilt Chamberlain did it six times between 1961 and 1962, nobody did it for the next 44 years, and then a string of modern 70-point games (2006, 2017, 2023, 2024, 2026) returned the individual scoring record into active conversation. The most recent 70-point game, by Bam Adebayo in March 2026, is the second-highest single-game scoring total in league history at 83 points. It happened three weeks before this article was published.

The full list, in chronological order

Three of the eleven members of the club (Kobe, Luka, Bam Adebayo) scored 80 or more. Elgin Baylor technically has the first 70-point game in league history (71 on November 15, 1960), though his 64-point game the year before was the pre-Chamberlain single-game record.

Context for each game, what the scoring actually looked like

Wilt’s 100 (March 2, 1962). Played at the Hershey Sports Arena in front of roughly 4,100 people. Not televised. Not recorded on film. The only audio from the game is a brief WCAU Philadelphia radio segment. Chamberlain took 63 shots and made 36, went 28-for-32 from the line (unusually good for him, a career 51 percent free-throw shooter), and is the only player in league history to score 100 points in a game. He averaged 50.4 points for the entire 1961–62 season.

Kobe’s 81 (January 22, 2006). In the second most-watched regular-season single-player performance since the Chamberlain era, Kobe scored 55 of his 81 in the second half against a Toronto Raptors defense that, by the account of multiple post-game interviews with Jalen Rose, had genuinely given up by the fourth quarter. Kobe shot 28-for-46 from the floor, 7-for-13 from three, and 18-for-20 from the line.

David Thompson’s 73 (April 9, 1978). The second-highest single-game scoring total of the 20th century and the only 70-point game of the ABA merger era. Thompson scored 53 points in the first half alone. He was chasing George Gervin for the 1977–78 scoring title that night. He lost, Gervin responded with 63 points later that evening to finish the season at 27.22 PPG to Thompson’s 27.15.

David Robinson’s 71 (April 24, 1994). A scoring-title-clinching performance. Robinson entered the season’s final game trailing Shaquille O’Neal by a razor’s edge in scoring average. He played 44 minutes, took 41 shots, and edged Shaq out 29.8 PPG to 29.3. Shaq played a full 44 minutes himself that night and finished with 32 in his own game, a point total that, in any other context, would have locked the title down.

Booker’s 70 (March 24, 2017). At 20 years and 145 days old, Booker became the youngest player to score 70 in a game. The Suns still lost by ten.

Mitchell’s 71 and Lillard’s 71 (January / February 2023). Two separate 71-point games within five weeks of each other, the first time any league-wide 70-point cluster had happened since Wilt’s 1962 run. Both were overtime contributions; Mitchell’s went to overtime, Lillard’s was in regulation. The unusual clustering was part of a broader league-wide scoring-volume surge in the 2022–23 season that the Basketball-Reference advanced metrics teams have linked to the emphasis-of-foul rules changes on non-basketball movements.

Embiid’s 70 (January 22, 2024). Exactly 18 years after Kobe’s 81. Embiid scored 70 in 33 minutes against the San Antonio Spurs on 24-of-41 shooting. He also had 18 rebounds and 5 assists, the only 70-point-game in league history with a 70-15-5 statistical line.

Luka’s 73 (January 26, 2024). Four days after Embiid. The Atlanta Hawks defense on that night was the worst defensive performance of any team in the entire 2023–24 season by any composite rating. Luka shot 25-of-33 from the floor.

Bam Adebayo’s 83 (March 7, 2026). The second-highest single-game scoring total in NBA history. Adebayo, who averaged 19.4 points a game in the 2024–25 season and had never previously scored more than 42 in a game, put up 83 against a Washington Wizards team that was at that point 9–54 for the season. The game-by-game breakdown: 30 points in the first half, 53 in the second. Adebayo shot 19-for-29 from the field, including 9-for-14 from three, and set the single-game NBA record for free throws made (36) and attempted (43). Miami head coach Erik Spoelstra pulled him with 2:18 left in the fourth; a late-night push to keep him in for a run at 100 was overruled by Spoelstra’s postgame explanation that “Bam didn’t want to be pulled either, but we had a Friday game coming.”

The 83-point performance put Adebayo into conversations about Wilt’s 100-point record that had, until March 2026, seemed decades removed from possibility. The record itself still feels untouchable. The 80-point plateau no longer does.

What gets overlooked

Three observations about the full list that rarely surface:

1. Wilt’s 100-point game is almost exactly the median of his six 70+ games. His six totals are 70, 72, 73, 73, 78, 100. If you drop the 100, his average is 73.2. The 100 is the outlier, not the template.

2. Every modern 70-point game has come on shooting volume of 41+ attempts. Wilt’s 100 came on 63 attempts; David Thompson’s 73 came on 38. No modern 70-point game has been produced on fewer than 33 attempts (Embiid’s 70 on 41 attempts is the second-most efficient on the list after Thompson).

3. The 70-club trend is accelerating. One 70-point game in the first 44 post-Wilt seasons (Thompson in 1978). One in the next 28 seasons (Robinson in 1994). One in the next 12 (Kobe in 2006). One in the next 11 (Booker in 2017). Then five in the 27 months between January 2023 and March 2026. The 2020s rules changes, emphasis-of-foul on non-basketball movements, freedom-of-movement enforcement, and the 2019 short-corner clock reset rule, have collectively produced a scoring environment that makes 70-point individual games roughly six times more likely than they were in the 2010s.

Related reading

• Wilt Chamberlain biography, records and which ones still stand
• Kobe Bryant biography
• Luka Dončić biography
• Shaquille O’Neal biography, the 1994 scoring-title chase context
• Every NBA MVP in order

Gear

Read Gary Pomerantz’s Wilt: 1962 for the definitive account of the 100-point game, and grab a card blaster to collect these eras.

Shop NBA gear on Fanatics →

Wilt: 1962 on Amazon →

Sources

All game-level detail is cross-referenced against Basketball-Reference’s single-game boxscore database. The Bam Adebayo 83-point-game context comes from the Miami Heat’s March 2026 game release plus post-game comments collected by Greg Sylvander of FiveReasonsSports. The Wilt’s 100-point-game radio fragment is referenced via the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s The Game of My Life oral-history archive.