The Most 40-Point Games in NBA History

The most 40-point games in NBA history are dominated by one player by such a wide margin that the rest of the leaderboard feels like a separate competition. Wilt Chamberlain has 271 career 40-point games. Michael Jordan, the all-time runner-up, has 173. The gap between Wilt and Jordan — 98 games — is itself larger than the career totals of most elite scorers who have ever played. The 40-point club is selective enough that only four players in NBA history have ever reached 100 career games with 40 or more points. The leaderboard is essentially a story about one era Wilt created that no one has come close to repeating, and a modern group of elite scorers methodically building totals that will define their legacies.

What a 40-Point Game Actually Means

Before running through the leaderboard, it's worth establishing what 40 points represents. In any given 82-game regular season, there are roughly 80-100 individual 40-point performances shared among 450 active players. A player who hits 40 three or four times in a single season is operating at a level most All-Stars never reach in their entire careers. The threshold is meaningful because the volume required to hit it repeatedly is so far outside what normal elite scoring looks like. Reaching it once is a career highlight. Reaching it 50, 100, or 270 times is a different category of achievement entirely — one that separates scorers from scoring machines.

Wilt Chamberlain — The Impossible Season

In the 1961-62 season, Wilt Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points per game across 80 games. He scored 40 or more points in 63 of those 80 games — 79 percent of the season. That single-season total of 63 forty-point games is more than any other player except Jordan and Bryant have produced across their entire careers. The following season, 1962-63, Wilt averaged 44.8 points per game and hit 40-plus in 52 more games. In just those two seasons alone, he accumulated 115 forty-point games — more than Elgin Baylor managed in his entire career.

The era context matters but doesn't diminish the record. Pace was faster, the three-point line didn't exist, and Wilt averaged 48.5 minutes per game in 1961-62 — including overtime minutes. No modern player approaches 40 minutes on a consistent basis. But the volume Chamberlain produced was so extreme that even adjusting heavily for era, the career total of 271 forty-point games stands in a category no one else occupies. His single-season record of 63 has never been challenged. His second-best season of 52 has never been challenged. His all-time career record of 271 is 98 games clear of the nearest competitor. Wilt Chamberlain is not the greatest scorer in NBA history in the sense of total points — LeBron James owns that record — but as a pure scoring machine across individual peak seasons, the evidence is irreproducible.

Michael Jordan — Second Place, Permanently

Michael Jordan's 173 career 40-point games will almost certainly stand as the permanent second-place record. The 1986-87 season was his most explosive single-season output — he averaged 37.1 points per game, the highest single-season scoring average of his career, and put together a nine-game streak of 40-plus point performances during November and December of that year. Jordan's nine-game streak in 1986-87 tied the modern-era record — a record Kobe Bryant would later match in 2003.

What made Jordan's accumulation remarkable was its sustained quality across winning seasons, playoff runs, and individual stretches that still define what peak NBA scoring looks like in the post-Wilt era. His career scoring average of 30.1 points per game across 15 seasons remains the highest in NBA history. The 173 forty-point games are the natural byproduct of sustaining that average for over a decade — the floor of his best nights appearing at a rate no one since has matched outside of Chamberlain's era.

Kobe Bryant — The Nine-Game Echo

Kobe Bryant finished his career with 122 forty-point games — third all-time behind Chamberlain and Jordan. His 2002-03 season produced one of the most referenced scoring streaks in NBA history: nine consecutive games of 40 or more points in February, tying the streak Jordan had set in 1986-87. That stretch included a 51-point night in Denver immediately after a 42-point performance at home — 93 points across two consecutive games. The Lakers went 7-2 during that run.

Bryant's career total of 122 is notable for what it required — 20 seasons of elite productivity, multiple serious injuries including an Achilles tear in 2013 that ended his final years of prime production, and a late-career that operated at a significantly reduced pace. He scored 60 points in his final NBA game in 2016, a 60-18-11 line that retired the scorer perfectly. The 122 games across his career represent the kind of sustained high-volume output that only appears once or twice per generation.

Editorial illustration: The Most 40-Point Games in NBA History

James Harden — The 2018-19 Season

James Harden sits fourth all-time with 107 career 40-point games, making him one of only four players in NBA history to eclipse the 100-game threshold. His 2018-19 season is the single most impressive 40-point-game campaign in the post-Wilt era outside of Jordan's 1986-87. Harden averaged 36.1 points per game that season — the seventh-highest single-season scoring average in league history — and produced 28 games with 40 or more points, a total that only Wilt and Jordan have exceeded in any single season. In January 2019 alone, he averaged 43.6 points per game across 14 games and scored 61 points against the New York Knicks and another 61 against San Antonio within the same season.

Harden's path to 107 was built on a style that maximizes attempts: elite foul-drawing, volume three-point shooting, and an isolation game that opponents could dissect but rarely stop. He won the 2018-19 scoring title with 36.1 PPG and was the MVP runner-up to Giannis Antetokounmpo. The 100-career mark came in November 2024, placing him alongside Chamberlain, Jordan, and Bryant in a club that, given the structure of the modern game, may never add a fifth member.

Elgin Baylor — The Forgotten Pioneer

Elgin Baylor's 88 career 40-point games represent the most-overlooked number on the all-time leaderboard. He ranks fifth — between Harden and Allen Iverson — but plays in a historical blind spot that post-Jordan fans rarely explore. Baylor was the NBA's dominant one-on-one scorer before anyone else claimed that role, and he did it in an era when the game rewarded volume offensive production in ways similar to Chamberlain's seasons. On November 15, 1960, he scored 71 points against the New York Knicks — the NBA's single-game scoring record at the time, held until Chamberlain broke it with 100 in 1962. Baylor's 71 still stands as the sixth-highest single-game total in NBA history.

His career was cut short by a knee injury that caused him to retire 12 games into the 1971-72 season — the same year the Lakers won the championship without him. The 88 forty-point games he accumulated reflect scoring seasons where he was the most dangerous offensive player on the floor, averaging above 27 points per game for five consecutive seasons at his peak. That he sits fifth all-time is a quiet argument for his case as one of the most underappreciated scorers in the game's history.

Allen Iverson and Oscar Robertson — Volume in Different Eras

Allen Iverson's 79 career 40-point games and Oscar Robertson's 77 occupy a similar tier that illustrates how dominant individual scorers can produce near-identical totals across vastly different playing environments. Iverson built his total over an 18-year career defined by usage rates that rarely had precedent — in multiple seasons, he was effectively his team's entire offense, handling the ball on nearly every significant possession and absorbing the defensive attention of the league's best guards. His six scoring titles came in eras when teams defended differently, but the 79 forty-point games are a testament to the relentlessness of his attack.

Robertson's 77 games came before the merger, in the pre-ABA era when pace was among the highest in league history. Robertson averaged a triple-double for the entire 1961-62 season — 30.8 points, 12.5 assists, and 10.4 rebounds per game — an accomplishment that stood as unique in NBA history for 55 years. The 77 forty-point games he produced illustrate what Robertson was doing with volume production during the same years Wilt was setting scoring records: putting up numbers that hadn't been seen before, just without the ball going in the basket at the same historic rate.

Rick Barry and George Gervin — The Scoring Title Era

Rick Barry's 70 NBA 40-point games tie him in the all-time rankings alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Barry was one of the most relentless scorers in the NBA from 1965 to 1980, winning the 1974-75 championship with the Golden State Warriors and the Finals MVP. His 70 NBA forty-point games don't include his ABA career output — he had 45 additional such games in the rival league — making his combined professional total 115, which would rank fourth all-time on the full professional basketball ledger behind Chamberlain, Jordan, and Bryant.

George Gervin's 68 career forty-point games came primarily during the San Antonio Spurs era of the 1970s and 1980s. "The Iceman" won four scoring titles and built a career 26.2 PPG average that represents one of the most efficient volume-scoring profiles in pre-modern NBA history. Gervin's 68 forty-point games place him tenth all-time — a number that understates his peak, given the pace and defensive context of his era.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — The Anomaly at the Top

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 70 career forty-point games are perhaps the most statistically interesting number on the entire leaderboard — not because they're high, but because they're so low relative to everything else Kareem accomplished. He holds the all-time NBA scoring record of 38,387 points, a total that stood as the most in league history for 38 years until LeBron James passed it in February 2023. He played 20 seasons, won six championships, and was a dominant force well into his late 30s. Yet he accumulated only 70 forty-point games across that entire career — fewer than Bryant had in roughly half as many seasons at comparable age.

The reason is structural. Kareem's offense was built on efficiency rather than volume. The skyhook — the most unstoppable single shot in NBA history — maximized two-point production without requiring the raw attempt volume that creates 40-point nights. In his peak seasons, Kareem regularly led the league in scoring while taking fewer shots than any other champion in the same era. The 40-point threshold rewards a specific style of volume attack; Kareem's game was calibrated to produce points without triggering that threshold.

The Modern Challengers

The current generation of elite scorers is stacking forty-point games at paces that will reshape the lower half of the all-time leaderboard. Stephen Curry has accumulated roughly 75 regular-season forty-point games — a number that will likely land him in the all-time top ten by retirement. Luka Dončić has 69 career forty-point games at just 26 years old; his pace projects to a career total that could threaten Kobe's 122. Damian Lillard has 60 career forty-point games across his career with Portland and Milwaukee. Joel Embiid has approximately 50.

LeBron James — the all-time scoring leader — has 79 regular-season forty-point games, one of the few categories where his record-breaking career total and individual explosion diverge. Like Kareem, LeBron built his all-time points record on consistency across 1,400-plus games rather than volume peaks. Averaging 27.1 points per game for over two decades produces the all-time scoring record; it doesn't produce Wilt's 271 forty-point nights.

Why Wilt's Record Will Never Fall

Wilt's 271 isn't going to fall. Modern players play approximately 70-75 games per regular season on average — reduced from the 80-82 of Wilt's era, and heavily managed in terms of minutes. Load management, back-to-back restrictions, and the modern front-office philosophy around protecting franchise players have collectively reduced the number of opportunities any individual scorer gets to reach 40. To match Wilt's career total, a modern player starting at age 22 would need to produce 20 forty-point games per season for more than 13 seasons — a pace nobody since Wilt himself has approached for more than a single season.

Jordan's 173 is theoretically catchable — Luka Dončić, if healthy and consistent, might reach it in his early 30s. But the gap between Wilt's 271 and any modern player's realistic career trajectory is not a gap of circumstances or era adjustments. It is simply an argument that one player, in two specific seasons in the early 1960s, produced scoring output that no subsequent generation of basketball — faster, more analytically sophisticated, richer in athletes — has been able to approximate.

What These Numbers Reveal About Elite Scoring

Read the top ten end-to-end and a few patterns emerge. The players with the most forty-point games share a specific profile: exceptional ball usage, a reliable mid-range or post move that allows them to score under pressure, and a style of play that prioritizes individual volume over team-dependent shot creation. Wilt, Jordan, Kobe, Harden — each of them built their totals on a personal scoring engine that didn't require specific teammates, specific systems, or optimal game states to operate. They could score 40 in a blowout loss as easily as in a playoff game.

The players who don't appear on this list — Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, John Stockton, Chris Paul — were elite players whose offensive games ran through system and creation rather than personal volume. Forty-point games require a specific kind of selfishness, applied deliberately across hundreds of regular-season games. The leaderboard above isn't just a record of the game's best scorers. It's a record of the scorers who chose, night after night, to take the weight of the offense themselves — and had the ability to carry it.

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