Wilt Chamberlain's records: which are still standing in 2026

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Most basketball records are made to be broken. Wilt Chamberlain’s are not. Sixty-four years after the night he scored 100 points against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the closest any NBA player has come is Kobe Bryant’s 81 in 2006, and the closest since Kobe is Bam Adebayo’s 83 against Washington in March 2026. Both are 17 to 19 points short of Wilt’s number. The 100-point game sits on the all-time leaderboard like a different geological era, and it is one of about a dozen Wilt Chamberlain records that, taken together, constitute the most dominant single statistical résumé any team-sport athlete has ever assembled.

This page tracks every Wilt record that is still standing in 2026, every record he held that has since been broken (a short list), and the small handful that are technically within reach of a current player.

Records that will probably never be broken

100 points in a single game (March 2, 1962)

The setting: a Friday-night Philadelphia Warriors home game scheduled at the Hershey Sports Arena, about 100 miles west of Philadelphia (the Warriors’ nominal home arena was Convention Hall). The opponent: the New York Knicks. The Knicks’ starting center, Phil Jordon, was sick and did not play. Reserve Darrall Imhoff, a six-foot-ten rookie, drew the assignment. Wilt was 25 years old and in the middle of a season in which he averaged 50.4 points per game.

He scored 23 in the first quarter, 18 in the second, 28 in the third, and 31 in the fourth. He went 36-of-63 from the field and a startling 28-of-32 from the free-throw line (a career anomaly; Wilt was a 51% career FT shooter). Dave Zinkoff, the Warriors’ PA announcer, began calling out his point total in the third quarter. The Knicks intentionally fouled him for most of the fourth to keep him off the field-goal column. Knicks coach Eddie Donovan substituted Imhoff out at the eight-minute mark of the fourth and put in Cleveland Buckner. Buckner gave up a few more buckets. With 46 seconds left and Wilt at 98 points, teammate Joe Ruklick fed him a pass under the basket. Wilt scored. The crowd of 4,124 stormed the court. The game was stopped for several minutes. Final box score: Warriors 169, Knicks 147. Wilt: 100 points, 25 rebounds.

There is no surviving television footage. Local Philadelphia radio (WCAU) carried the game; the broadcast tape is at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame archive. Photographer Paul Vathis caught the famous shot of Wilt holding a piece of paper with “100” written on it in the locker room afterward.

The closest anyone has come since: Kobe Bryant’s 81 against the Toronto Raptors on January 22, 2006, and Bam Adebayo’s 83 against the Washington Wizards on March 1, 2026 (covered in detail on our every 70-point NBA game page).

Standing.

50.4 points per game (1961-62 season)

Wilt’s season scoring average across the 1961-62 season was 50.36 points per game across 80 games. The next-highest seasonal scoring average ever is Wilt’s own 44.8 from 1962-63. After that, Michael Jordan’s 37.1 in 1986-87 is the highest by any player not named Wilt. The 50.4 mark is unbroken and structurally unbreakable in the modern game (two-thirds the per-game shot attempts of Wilt’s era, three-point arcs that compress shot value, defensive switching).

Standing.

4,029 points in a season (1961-62)

Same season. Wilt is the only player ever to score 4,000 points in an NBA regular season. The next-closest is Michael Jordan at 3,041 in 1986-87. Joel Embiid in 2023-24 was on pace through January but was injured and finished at 1,659. An 82-game schedule and 38 minutes per night of even the highest-volume scorer caps a realistic modern season at 2,800 to 3,000 points.

Standing.

22.9 rebounds per game (1960-61)

Wilt averaged 22.9 rebounds per game across the 1960-61 season. He averaged 25.7 in 1957-58 (his rookie year), 27.0 in 1959-60, and 24.7 in 1968-69 with the Lakers. Bill Russell averaged 23.9 in 1963-64. The two of them, between 1957 and 1969, averaged seasons in the 20-to-27 rebound range almost every year.

The closest any post-1980 player has come to a 22.9 season is Dennis Rodman’s 18.7 in 1991-92. The current era’s rebounding leaders typically average 12 to 15. The mark is not reachable in the modern game.

Standing.

23,924 career rebounds

Wilt’s career rebound total is 23,924 across 1,045 NBA games. Bill Russell finished at 21,620 across 963 games. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at 17,440. The next-closest active player as of April 2026 is Andre Drummond at roughly 9,800. Drummond is 33. He would have to add another 14,000 rebounds to break the record. He plays about 25 minutes a night.

Standing.

55 rebounds in a single game (November 24, 1960)

Against the Boston Celtics. Bill Russell, the man Wilt was rebounding against, finished with 19. The 55-rebound mark is the all-time NBA single-game record. Bill Russell himself owns the second and third spots on the list (51, 49). No NBA player since 1973 has broken 30 rebounds in a single game.

Standing.

48.5 minutes per game (1961-62)

Wilt played 3,882 minutes across the Warriors’ 80 regular-season games in 1961-62. Eight of those games went to overtime. He played every minute of every regulation period plus every minute of every overtime. He did not sit out a single second of the entire season. He averaged 48.5 minutes per game in a 48-minute game.

Standing. Mathematically impossible to break (the record can be tied with multiple-overtime games; it cannot be exceeded without changing the game’s structure).

1,045 NBA games without fouling out

Wilt played 14 NBA seasons. He never fouled out of a single regular-season or playoff game. Not once. He averaged 2.0 fouls per game across his career, which is, for a center who played 45 minutes a night against Bill Russell and Nate Thurmond, an absurd number.

Standing. No active player is close.

The records that have been broken

78 points in a single game (December 8, 1961, three overtimes)

Wilt scored 78 points against the Lakers in a triple-overtime game, breaking the NBA single-game record of 71 held by Elgin Baylor. The 78-point mark stood for less than three months. Wilt himself broke it with the 100-point game on March 2, 1962. The 78 has since been passed by Wilt’s 100, Kobe’s 81, and Bam Adebayo’s 83.

126 consecutive games with 20+ points

Wilt scored 20 or more points in 126 straight regular-season games between October 1961 and February 1963. The streak stood for 64 years. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tied it in February 2026 and extended it to 127 in March 2026. The Wilt mark is no longer the record. SGA’s streak was active as of mid-April 2026 at 134 games.

65 consecutive games scoring 30+ points

Wilt scored 30 or more points in 65 straight games during 1961-62. Joel Embiid in February-April 2023 ran a streak of 27 straight games with 30+, the closest any active player has come. The streak record remains in Wilt’s name.

The records within reach (in theory)

30+ points and 20+ rebounds in a single game

Wilt did this 174 times in his career. Russell did it 56 times. The closest active player is Nikola Jokić at 14 (through April 2026). The structural difference is the modern game’s 12-to-14-rebound ceiling for elite centers. Jokić cannot break the record before he retires. Untouchable in practice.

50+ points in 45 different games

Wilt scored 50 or more in 118 different regular-season games (and 45 in playoff games). Michael Jordan ranks second on the regular-season list with 31 such games. The next active player is Joel Embiid at 9. Reachable in theory, untouchable in practice.

Why the records hold

The structural answer is that 1961-62 was a moment of maximum offensive freedom. The shot clock had been in place for seven years, long enough to standardize tempo. The three-point line did not yet exist. Defensive rules permitted hand-checking, holding, and contact that would draw a flagrant foul in 2026. The average team scored 118 points per game (11 more than the 2024-25 league average of 107). And Wilt was 25 years old and 7’1” with the strength of an Olympic decathlete.

Wilt, in his 1973 autobiography Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door, wrote that the 1961-62 season was the only year he played basketball without a sense of defensive matchup; he was simply better than every center in the league by a margin that did not require strategic adjustment.

The post-2000 NBA, with its three-point arc and switching defenses, has produced exactly one season above 35 points per game in modern history (Russell Westbrook’s 31.6 in 2016-17 was the recent peak before Luka Dončić’s 33.9 in 2023-24). The 1961-62 NBA was a different sport. The records from it will, almost all of them, still be there in 2050.

The two records most likely to be broken in the next decade: zero. The two records that have been broken since Wilt set them: 78 points (broken by his own 100 three months later), and the 126 consecutive 20-point games (broken by SGA in March 2026).

Everything else is staying right where it is.

Gear

Read Gary Pomerantz’s Wilt: 1962 — the only book built entirely around a single regular-season game — and shop Los Angeles Lakers throwback gear.

Shop Lakers gear on Fanatics →

Wilt: 1962 on Amazon →

Sources

• Basketball-Reference: Wilt Chamberlain.
• Wilt Chamberlain with David Shaw, Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7-Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door (Macmillan, 1973).
• Gary M. Pomerantz, Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era (Crown, 2005).
• Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame archive recordings of WCAU radio broadcast, Warriors-Knicks, March 2, 1962.
• Sports Illustrated, Lee Jenkins coverage of Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game (January 2006).
• ESPN game recap, Heat vs Wizards, March 1, 2026 (Bam Adebayo 83 points).