-San Francisco Chronicle
The GOAT debate is the most common argument across all sports, with people arguing to the brink of exhaustion about why their criteria and choice is the most accurate depiction of the greatest player of all-time in that sport. Although, not too far behind that lags the peak debate, where people argue which player was the best at the very apex of their powers. When you apply this single season peak question the sport of basketball, you are responded to with the common culprits, 2012-2013 LeBron James, 1990-1991 Michael Jordan, 1999-2000 Shaquille O'Neal, etc. But other than those, and even ahead of those in some instances, one of the most common answers you will receive is 1961-1962 Wilt Chamberlain, mostly due to his BasketballRefrence page. In the 1962 NBA season, Wilt Chamberlain recorded unarguably the greatest face value box score season of all-time, averaging 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds per contest. These stats in their raw form appear so video-game like, people automatically assume that this was one of the most dominant seasons in the history of the league. However, not only do I believe that 1962 isn't a top 5 Wilt season, I also think it doesn't have an argument for a top 75 NBA season of all- time. Now that may sound asinine, but its is important for us to understand that these raw box score stats severely lack context, and that once we begin to apply that context, the argument for 1962 Wilt Chamberlain as an all-time season begins to fade swiftly.
Let's start with his scoring. When people look at 50.4 points per game on scoring efficiency roughly 6 percentage points ahead of league average, they automatically assume that it is one of, if not the greatest scoring season in NBA history. They couldn't be farther from the truth. It is important to note that Wilt's per game scoring numbers are not only inflated by the fact that he was playing every single minute of every single game, but also by the fact that the league was playing at an all-time high pace of 130 possessions per game. To put that into perspective, in today's NBA the average game has about 100 possessions. That means Wilt was getting 30 extra possessions per game to pad his point total. If we use PTS/75, a metric that measures a players scoring rate per 75 possessions (the typical amount of possessions a star player plays in an average NBA regular season game today), 1962 Chamberlain comes in at 28.8 points per 75. If we transport that number into the 2020-2021 regular season, it would rank 10th in the league, behind Joel Embiid, Stephen Curry, Bradley Beal, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, Kevin Durant, Zion Williamson, Damian Lillard and Donovan Mitchell. Now don't get me wrong, 28.8 points per 75 is still very good scoring, but it isn't as appealing to the eye as 50.4 points, and it certainly isn't the extreme historic outlier it appears to be in the box score.
However, offense isn't solely predicated on your scoring, it's about how much your helping your team put the ball in the basket. This is where Chamberlain's playmaking, or perhaps the better terminology would be the lack thereof, factors into the equation.1962 Wilt Chamberlain is the closest you will ever come to successfully applying the metaphor of a "black hole" to a basketball player. It's not like Wilt couldn't pass, as we saw at a late part in his career, he simply chose not to. In 1962, despite his immense scoring gravity, Wilt averaged just shy of 1.4 assists per 75. That is an unfathomably low number, especially considering that he was averaging an astronomic 27.5 scoring attempts over the same amount of possessions. Applying that ratio, it means that Wilt was setting up his teammates to score once for every 20 shots he took! That number right there is the true most outlier component of Chamberlain's 1962 NBA season.
This means that Wilt was a one trick pony on offense. He could only help his team's offense by creating his own, degrading the offensive value of his teammates in the process. History shows us that volume scoring is only so valuable unless you're able to harness that scoring gravity into high value playmaking opportunities. This is the primary reason why Wilt's team (the Philadelphia Warriors at the time) only had an offense 2 points per 100 possessions better than league average, still pretty good offense, but not one indicative of being spearheaded by a player in the midst of a historical offensive season. Wilt's best team offenses would actually come with the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers in a stretch from 1967-1973, coinciding with his drastic shift from volume scoring to volume playmaking. During this time frame, Chamberlain co-led some of the greatest offenses ever up to that point, showcasing that his blackhole-like scoring centric playstyle was limiting his previous team's offenses.
-CBS Philly
Wilt Chamberlain's one dimensional offensive attack also made it easy to scheme against the Warriors in the playoffs. Teams could simply load up onto Chamberlain and force him into ill-advised shots, with no fear of getting beat by the pass. This was evident in the 1962 playoffs when Chamberlain went against Bill Russell's Celtics, the greatest defensive dynasty of all-time. In that postseason, Wilt's scoring volume plummeted to 26 points per 36 minutes, a near 30% decrease from the regular season. It is also not the case that Wilt suddenly began to leverage the defensive attention he received to create shots for his teammates, only increasing his assists by 0.5 per 36 minutes.
The last component of Chamberlain's inflated box score is his rebounding. When looking from a current lens back into the past, it seems impossible that someone could average 26.6 rebounds per game today. That's because it is impossible. Wilt's rebounding numbers are inflated by our previously discussed factors such as minutes played and possessions, but they are also inflated by the league's shooting accuracy. The average FG% for the league in 1962 was 42.6% (4% below what it was in 2021) and the average FT% was 73% (5% below what it was in 2021). This meant that there were drastically more misses for Chamberlain to rebound. If we look at rebounding rate, a metric that measures what percent of available rebounds you grabbed, Wilt comes in at a 13.5 OREB% and a 26 DREB%. Those numbers very closely resemble the rebounding of Tristan Thompson during the 2020-2021 regular season, which still makes him one of the better rebounders in the league, just not this huge historical outlier that is lapping the rest of the field.
To summarize, Wilts 1961-1962 season contextualized into today's environment would resemble something like 28.5 points on +6rTS% and 12.5 rebounds per game. He would also be a historically poor playmaker relative to his scoring volume, and this one dimensional offensive attack would result in him losing offensive value against playoff defenses. However, he would still be a top 10 defender in basketball. With the culmination of these factors, you're probably looking at a season that falls just short of 2021 Joel Embiid in terms of value, still giving him a borderline MVP season in my estimation, but a far cry from an all-time one.
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