This week in 1959: Wilt Chamberlain arrives with 43 points and 28 rebounds, a debut nobody has topped

Wilt Chamberlain played his first NBA game on Saturday, October 24, 1959, and finished it with 43 points and 28 rebounds as the Philadelphia Warriors won 118-109 against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. No player before or since has scored more in a debut. Sixty-seven years later, the line still reads like a misprint, and it was only the opening act of the most statistically outrageous career the league has seen.

How the night unfolded

Chamberlain started at center and never sat down, logging all 48 minutes. He made 17 of his 27 shots from the field, a 63 percent clip on a night when everyone else on the floor went 71 of 196, and added 9 of 15 at the free-throw line. His 28 rebounds topped Tom Gola’s 13 and Paul Arizin’s 11 put together, out of 74 for the Warriors as a group.

The Warriors led 31-27 after the first quarter, held a 55-52 edge at halftime and stretched it to 85-77 after three before closing with a 33-point fourth. Paul Arizin and Guy Rodgers scored 19 apiece, Rodgers also handing out 11 assists, and Tom Gola added 13 points and 13 rebounds. New York’s best answer was Kenny Sears, who scored 35 and did not miss any of his 13 free throws. The Knicks shot just 40 of 119 from the floor.

Why it mattered then

The Warriors had waited years for this. They claimed Chamberlain as a territorial pick tied to his Philadelphia roots at Overbrook High School, then watched him spend his college years at Kansas and a season touring with the Harlem Globetrotters, a year that paid him $50,000. When he finally signed, his $30,000 rookie deal made him the highest-paid player in the league before he had played a minute.

The debut answered whether he was worth it. The previous record for points in a first NBA game, 35, belonged to Frank Selvy of the Milwaukee Hawks in 1954. Chamberlain cleared it by eight on his first night, and the mark has survived every rookie class since; VJ Edgecombe’s 34 for the Sixers in 2025 ranks behind both.

What came next

The rookie season that followed has no parallel. Chamberlain averaged 37.6 points and 27.0 rebounds, led the league in both, and became the first player to win Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season. He was also named All-Star Game MVP and made the All-NBA First Team. The Warriors went 49-26, beat Syracuse in the division semifinals and fell to Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics in six games in the division finals. Afterward, Chamberlain stunned Philadelphia by saying he was thinking about retiring.

He did not. Two and a half seasons later, on March 2, 1962, against the same Knicks on a neutral floor in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he scored 100 points. He retired in 1973 with 31,419 points at 30.1 a game and 23,924 rebounds at 22.9 a game, the rebounding total still the most in league history. The franchise he joined that night now plays as the Golden State Warriors, and the Knicks are still waiting for anyone else to do to them what he did in his first 48 minutes.