Scoring in the NBA this season is up to the highest level since Wilt Chamberlain’s days, with players recording feats of scoring seldom seen since 1962. For example, Donovan Mitchell scored 71 last week, and Luka Doncic of Slovenia has scored 50 to 60 three times.So the New York Times sports section has rounded up some elderly basketball players to talk about whether today’s high scorers really can compare to Wilt.
The old players’ view: Of course not. We were real men back in the those days.
Measuring Up to Wilt Chamberlain May Take More Than Stats
Several N.B.A. players have had Chamberlain-like performances this season. But to some, he will always be untouchable.
By Harvey Araton
Jan. 12, 2023…
This season, Antetokounmpo, among others, has been drawing enough statistical comparisons to Wilt Chamberlain—who scored a record 100 points in a game and averaged a mind-boggling 50 per game for a season — to wonder if the sport has ascended to its most exceptional athletic plane.
Or, if its video-game mimicry is as much or more the result of competitive engineering.
Take a significantly expanded area of attack due to rampant 3-point shooting; open up driving lanes to the physically blessed and skilled likes of Antetokounmpo to score or find open teammates on the perimeter. What you get is an array of eye-opening individual stat lines in a league where team scoring has soared by roughly 15 points from where it was a decade ago. …
Walt Frazier [age 77], the Hall of Fame guard who broadcasts Knicks games and once shared a backcourt with Garrett at Southern Illinois, has an idea why.
“What you mostly see now are guys running up and down, dunking on people,” he said in a telephone interview. “Only a few teams buckle down on defense. They don’t double-team when someone goes off. When someone came in and dropped 40 on me, it was always, ‘Clyde got destroyed.’ Now Doncic scores 60 and no one even says who was guarding him.”
… But for every progression in size, skills and worldwide production of talent, the old guard will judiciously argue that their game was fundamentally sounder, tactically superior, defensively stouter.
But not in 1962, when Wilt scored 100 in one game and averaged 50 points per season. According to Bill Simmons, the NBA management had gotten the word out to players that fans didn’t come to see tough defense, they came to see scoring. So everybody ran up and down the court and shot without much in the way of defending, which was great for scoring, rebounding, and assist stats (e.g., Oscar Robertson averaged a triple double).
I didn’t see Wilt in 1962, but I watched him play a lot in his last two seasons, 1972-73, by which point Laker coach Bill Sharman had persuaded him to not shoot much and instead play team ball like his old rival Bill Russell and concentrate on defense and rebounding, at which he was awesome.
As much of a specimen as Wilt was at 7’1″ and 280+ pounds (up 40 pounds after he become a habitué of Muscle Beach in 1968), with amazing jumping skills—there are no photos of Wilt touching the top of the backboard 13 feet off the grounds, but Chick Hearn said Jerry West had quarters put on top of the backboard in practice and Wilt grabbed them off, something that has only been done a few times since, if ever—he lacked the fine motor skills to be a great offensive player once defenses evolved and tough defending big men other than Bill Russell emerged (Kareem, Willis Reed, Nate Thurmond, Bob Lanier, etc.).
Wilt had no jump shot. Many players born around 1936 like Wilt did not learn the modern jump shot growing up. For example, the New York Knicks center in the 1972 NBA finals, Jerry Lucas, a Kevin Love–like center, still shot an oddly effective two-handed set shot from his chest.
In contrast, almost all contemporary players have at least nice-looking jump shots. For example, I was going to compare Wilt to 6’10” Dwight Howard, a rebounds and blocks–oriented center, but although Howard almost never shoots long three-pointers, when he does his form is elegant.
Nor did Wilt have a hook shot, although post-Kareem, few modern players do either. Wilt was an awkward dribbler and was a famously bad free throw shooter. Other than dunking, his shots were restricted to the finger roll and the fall-away bankshot, both lame shots. Hearn hated it when Wilt occasionally resorted to his 1960s bread and butter fallaway in the 1970s.
So, yeah, as a general rule, today’s athletes are objectively better than your boyhood heroes.
