Tonight against the Boston Celtics, Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will likely score 20 or more points for the 127th consecutive time. This will break a 60-year-old record held by arguably the greatest basketball player in history, Wilt Chamberlain. Even though the SGA Wilt record is currently tied at 126, the two streaks are far from equal.
Chamberlain was the most dominant force the league had ever seen, or has seen to date. He was almost mythical in his achievements, and it is not hyperbolic to refer to him as the Babe Ruth or Wayne Gretzky of basketball. He held over 70 NBA records when he retired, and nearly five decades later, many of them are still intact. Gilgeous-Alexander is a fantastic player in his own right and the league’s reigning MVP, but even if his streak reaches 200, he is not in the same category as Wilt.
SGA Wilt Record: The Absurd Scoring
SGA’s streak began on November 1, 2024. Over the course of the last 126 games, he scored 4,092 points for an average of 32.5 points per game. He scored 30 or fewer points 52 times, and he scored in the 50’s five times. For good measure, he scored in the 40’s on 13 occasions. 53 times, he scored between 30 and 39, and it’s nearly impossible to take away from those achievements. Nearly, because during Chamberlain’s streak, he dwarfed those numbers.
Wilt’s streak began on October 19, 1961, and lasted until January 20, 1963. His streak only came to an end when he scored six points in four minutes for the Warriors before getting ejected defending teammate Wayne Hightower. If not for a rookie referee, the streak may have been 200 or even 300 games. It wasn’t, so there’s no point in speculating what might have been.
What actually did happen during that streak was that Chamberlain scored 100 points, scored in the 70’s five times (the same number of times that SGA scored in the 50’s), and in the 60’s 17 times (more than SGA scored in the 40’s). Chamberlain scored between 40 and 49 33 times over that 126-game stretch, and between 50 and 59 45 times. He totalled 6,193 points for an average of 49.2 points per game.
Gilgeous-Alexander has been phenomenal, and there’s no need to detract from his accomplishment, belittle it, or mention asterisks (which actually should never be mentioned alongside any record in any sport). This piece is just designed to shed light on the extreme dominance of the Big Dipper.
The 126-game streak is nowhere near the most impressive of Chamberlain’s remaining records. He had 128 career 30/30 games (30 points and 30 rebounds). Bill Russell is second all-time with three. Wilt had eight 40/40 games in his career, and nobody else in the history of the game of basketball has done it even once. His 118 career 50-point games are just a bit higher than Michael Jordan’s second-place number of 31.
SGA will get a standing ovation tonight if and when he breaks the record, and he deserves it. It’s just important to note that while 127 is greater than 126, Wilt’s 126 is light-years superior to SGA’s 127.
