One Final Game: Wilt Chamberlain
Date: May 10, 1973
How do you draw a line between great and good for a player as dominant as Wilt Chamberlain? For the man who once scored 100 points in a game, and averaged 50 over the course of a single season, where do you point to as his decline? He can drop 20 points off his per-game average and still be among the league’s leaders.
Even so, you can find the decline happening eventually as he hit his mid-30s. Playing for the Los Angeles Lakers, Chamberlain saw his scoring decrease below 20 points per game for the first time in his career, all the way down to 14.8 points per game in 1971-72 and 13.2 in his final season. Yet at the same time he led the league in field goal percentage and rebounding in each of those seasons, and he won the title alongside Jerry West in 1972. Chamberlain aged and slowed, but he was always a force to handle.
That’s illustrative of his final game as well. In the 1973 NBA Finals, in a rematch with the New York Knicks, Chamberlain scored 23 points, collected 21 rebounds and dished three assists. He played all 48 minutes, as he did in every gave in that series. It wasn’t perfect — he missed nine free throws, and the Lakers lost the game and the series – but it’s hard to look at such a line and think of it as anything less than excellent.
Chamberlain wouldn’t play another game after that series, but it was a solid final performance from the prolific center.