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Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain's rookie season alone would be a career highlight for most players — he won MVP in 1960 after averaging staggering numbers, and by 1961-62 he was putting up a 50.4 points-per-game season average, still the highest scoring average in a single NBA season by a wide margin and one of the more untouchable records in the sport. The signature moment of that 1961-62 season came on March 2, 1962: a 100-point game against the New York Knicks, played at Hersheypark Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Chamberlain shot 36-for-63 from the field and 28-for-32 from the free-throw line to reach the total — a mark that's stood for over six decades with no player getting closer than about 20 points to it since. Chamberlain won two NBA championships, one with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967 and one with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972, where he was also named Finals MVP. He added four regular-season MVP awards, seven scoring titles, and eleven rebounding titles across his career, including an NBA-record 55 rebounds in a single game in November 1960. Chamberlain's combination of scale and stamina was as remarkable as any of his scoring totals — he averaged 48.53 minutes per game (more than a full 48-minute game, accounting for overtime) during that 1961-62 season and never fouled out of a single game in his entire career, an endurance record that's as unusual as any scoring number he ever put up.
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entered the NBA in 1969 after a legendary UCLA career, spent six seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks, then moved to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975, where he'd spend the rest of his 20-season career anchoring the "Showtime" era teams of the 1980s. His signature move, the skyhook — an ambidextrous, sweeping hook shot released from well over most defenders' reach — proved close to unblockable across two full decades of professional basketball, contributing to a career .559 field goal percentage. He used it to break Wilt Chamberlain's all-time scoring record on April 5, 1984, a record Abdul-Jabbar himself would go on to hold for nearly four decades until LeBron James passed him in 2023. Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships — one with Milwaukee in 1971, and five more with the Lakers — and six regular-season MVP awards, still the most of any player in NBA history. That MVP total alone is a good shorthand for how long he stayed at an elite level: his six MVPs were spread across 1971 to 1980, meaning he was still the league's best player nearly a decade after his rookie season. Abdul-Jabbar's longevity is arguably as impressive as his peak — 38,387 career points scored across two decades and two very different eras of NBA basketball, from the run-and-gun 1970s to the more physical, defense-oriented 1980s, without ever losing the shot that made him close to unguardable.
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