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Wilt Chamberlain takes the ball and plays a game of keep away during the Eastern Division semi-final playoff game played in Cincinnati, OH. Philadelphia won the game 108-94. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
There’s a great new series on Prime about the ABA called Soul Power: The Legend of the American Basketball Association. It’s a really entertaining series that we heartily recommend. The ABA was a wild ride from beginning to end.
Rick Barry was in the league for several years and in the first episode, he talked about how he would be a better player today, given the improvements in nutrition, training and equipment and all the other ways science and technology have allowed players to improve.
He’s 100% correct about that. Now imagine that you applied all of that to Wilt Chamberlain.
Chamberlain was – still is – the most athletic big man in the history of the game. Shaquille O’Neal is the closest in terms of sheer strength and Hakeem Olajuwon is the closest in overall athleticism – but no one is close to Chamberlain’s total package, aside from averaging 50 points for a season and lifetime averages of 30.1 ppg, 22.9 rebounds and 4.4 assists. They didn’t keep track of blocks or steals until the 1973-74 season and he would have ranked very high in those categories too. There were some games where blocked shots are available and in those games, he averaged better than 8 per game, and his high was 23.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is his durability: Chamberlain routinely played 48 minutes per game, and in 1961-62, he averaged 48.52 mpg.
This video has some great footage of Chamberlain where you see him do things that big men, in general, only recently started to do. But Chamberlain was doing these things in the 1960s as a 7-1, 290 lb. center with world-class sprinter speed.
Barry is right and if you could apply that stuff, all those advances, to Chamberlain, you’d have someone who would be totally off the charts.
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