Wilt Chamberlain’s 73-point, 36-rebound game was one of the wildest box scores of his 1961-62 season

Wilt Chamberlain’s 73-point game on Jan. 13, 1962, is often treated as a prelude to the 100-point night that came later. That framing is accurate in sequence, but it undersells how overwhelming the earlier performance was: in the Warriors’ win over the Chicago Packers, Chamberlain paired 73 points with 36 rebounds and made the box score look almost as improbable on the glass as it did on the scoreboard.

The shooting line tells part of the story. Chamberlain made 29 of 48 field-goal attempts, a volume that made the scoring total possible and showed how relentlessly the Warriors fed him the ball. The rebounding total made the night even more unusual. Twenty-five boards in the 100-point game two months later would be a huge number for almost anyone else, but on Jan. 13 he cleared 36 rebounds, turning a huge scoring night into a more complete display of his reach over the game.

That balance is what makes the performance stand out inside the 1961-62 season. Chamberlain finished that year averaging 50.6 points, 25.7 rebounds and 48.5 minutes per game, numbers that remain almost unreadable by normal standards. The Jan. 13 outing did not create that season’s reputation by itself; instead, it captured the way Chamberlain could stretch a game past its usual limits in more than one category at once.

It is also a useful reminder not to blur the difference between a historic stat line and an award result. Chamberlain’s season was extraordinary, but he did not win the 1962 NBA MVP award. That honor went to Boston Celtics star Bill Russell, who won the league’s MVP three straight times from 1961 through 1963. The distinction matters because it keeps the record clean: Chamberlain owned the most extreme individual numbers of the season, while the award that year went elsewhere.

The Jan. 13 game remains especially striking because of where it sits in the calendar. It came two months before Chamberlain’s NBA-record 100-point game on March 2, 1962, and that later explosion has long dominated the public memory of his season. But the Chicago Packers performance deserves its own place in the ledger. Scoring 73 points already put enormous pressure on a defense; adding 36 rebounds meant Chamberlain was influencing possessions that ended with his own shot, with his own miss or with a cleanup on the glass.

That is why this game still reads as one of the most extreme box scores of the era, even in a season full of extreme box scores. The 100-point game is the milestone everyone knows. The Jan. 13 performance is something more specific: a night when Chamberlain was not only a scoring machine but also a controlling force on the boards, leaving a Warriors win and a stat line that almost refuses comparison.

Taken together, the two games bracket the center of Chamberlain’s legendary 1961-62 season. One became the league’s most famous scoring record. The other may better show the breadth of his domination, because it combined huge shot volume with a rebound total that would have been remarkable on its own. That is the value of revisiting Jan. 13, 1962: it shows that Chamberlain’s most astonishing season was not built on one outlier, but on repeated nights when ordinary box scores stopped applying.