Thunder’s SGA will break Wilt’s record: his milestone, in numbers
With SGA one game away from breaking the record for most straight 20-point games in history, AM850 breaks down the 20 most impressive stats about the streak.
On November 1, 2024, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 30 points in the victory Oklahoma City Thunder by 137-114 in Portland. It wasn’t a particularly notable performance at the time; Gilgeous-Alexander had averaged 30.1 points per game the previous season, en route to a second-place finish in the MVP race.
Now, 16 months later, that game has great historical significance, as it marked the beginning of a 126-game odyssey for a player who has since won the regular season MVP award, been named Finals MVP and tied a 63-year-old record.
Thursday night against the Boston Celtics (9:30 p.m. ET, Prime Video), Gilgeous-Alexander will try to score at least 20 points for the 127th consecutive gamesince that night in Portland. If he succeeds, he will surpass the great Wilt Chamberlain for the longest such streak in NBA history. It is a worthy record, based on historical consistency, for the man who once declared: “My whole life is consistent, everything I do.”
To commemorate that consistency, here are the 20 craziest, most extreme and impressive stats about Gilgeous-Alexander’s historic 20-point streak:
1. The first surprise about Gilgeous-Alexander’s achievement is that he even came close to Chamberlain’s record. No one else had achieved it before; Before SGA, the second-longest 20-point streak in NBA history belonged to Chamberlain himself, at 92 games. There’s a reason Gilgeous-Alexander considers Chamberlain “almost like a mythical creature,” because his statistical feats were so unique.
Oscar Robertson’s 79 games ranked him third, meaning that in all of NBA history until this season, Chamberlain was the only player to extend his streak to the equivalent of a full season. And even Robertson’s streak only got him to 63% of the record.
2. The competition has been even less attractive lately. In the 21st century, Kevin Durant is the only other player to have passed Chamberlain’s halfway point; had a 72-game streak, which began in his final season in Oklahoma City and ended early in his time with the Golden State Warriors. Next on the 21st century list is Kobe Bryant, who reached 63 games in a row, exactly half of Chamberlain’s 126, between December 2005 and November 2006.
On average, the longest 20-point streak for any MVP this century other than Gilgeous-Alexander is just 36 games.
The longest 20-point streaks of the MVPs of the 21st century
3. Meanwhile, the next-longest active streak behind SGA belongs to Kawhi Leonard at 42 games, and Leonard and the currently injured Joel Embiid (24 games) are the only active players whose streaks date back to 2025, much less 2024. Gilgeous-Alexander’s streak isn’t the result of an era effect so much as a superlative achievement from the reigning MVP and the heavy favorite to repeat in 2025-26.
4. In that historical context, it is worth doing calculations to contextualize the extreme streak. Over the past two seasons, during which Gilgeous-Alexander embarked on his record-breaking mission, players named to an All-Star team have scored more than 20 points in 71% of their games. Given that base probability, the chance of an All-Star scoring 20+ points in 126 consecutive games is about 1 in 3,200,000,000,000,000,000, or 1 in 3.2 trillion.
The quintillion range is also the same magnitude as an estimate of the number of grains of sand on Earth. In other words, the odds of a current NBA All-Star beating Chamberlain’s streak are roughly the odds of finding a specific grain of sand somewhere on the planet.
5. So how, exactly, did Gilgeous-Alexander overcome those crazy odds and achieve one of Chamberlain’s many all-time records? One answer is that he excelled in all areas of the court. Dividing Gilgeous-Alexander’s 4,092 points during his streak among the general areas of the attack, according to GeniusIQ, shows a remarkably even distribution. He has scored between 16% and 25% of his points in all five areas: free throw line, restricted area, key, mid-range and three-pointers.
For comparison, the second highest scoring player of the last two seasons is Luka Doncic. And while Doncic generates a similar proportion of his points from the free throw line (23%), his success is much higher on three-pointers (36%) than on shots near the basket (11%). Gilgeous-Alexander’s shot distribution is exceptionally even for a point guard in the modern NBA.
6. Gilgeous-Alexander is not a static player either; He has improved during his streak. He’s only a 35.9% 3-point shooter in his career, but that’s up to 39.3% since last year’s All-Star break. This mark puts him on the same level as star shooters such as Stephen Curry (39.8%), Kawhi Leonard (39.0%), Anthony Edwards (38.9%), Desmond Bane (38.8%) and Klay Thompson (38.4%) during that period.
7. Gilgeous-Alexander has also improved inside the arc: He’s making a career-high 60.1% of his 15 two-point attempts per game. That’s the most efficient two-point performance by a point guard in NBA history (minimum of 10 attempts per game).
8. Gilgeous-Alexander’s overall efficiency is also among the best thanks to the combination of his improved 3-point accuracy, his historic two-point accuracy, and his penchant for drawing fouls (90% free throw success rate). With a 66.7% free throw success rate, Gilgeous-Alexander ranks second on the all-time list of 30-point scorers. Only Stephen Curry’s 66.9% in the 2015-16 season, when he won the Most Valuable Player award unanimously and had arguably the best offensive season in NBA history, with a record 402 three-pointers, surpasses him.
9. Gilgeous-Alexander’s overall efficiency is further improved because he not only creates positive plays, but also avoids negative ones. He is averaging just 2.1 turnovers per game this season, the fewest recorded for a player averaging 30 points per game. The previous record belonged to Gilgeous-Alexander, who averaged 2.2 turnovers in the 2023-24 season. And last season, he recorded 2.4 turnovers per game, tying Michael Jordan’s 1995-96 season for the third fewest.
10. Since the start of last season, Gilgeous-Alexander naturally leads the league in 20-point games. But he’s also number one by a wide margin in 30-point games, with 86. Doncic is second with 59, 31% below the SGA total.
11. Gilgeous-Alexander is also tied for the most 40-point games since the start of last season; he and Edwards have 18 each.
12. And while Gilgeous-Alexander is known more for being a consistent scorer than being explosive, he also leads the league in 50-point games since the start of last season, with five. Nikola Jokic (four) is the only other player with more than two.
13. Graphing Gilgeous-Alexander’s point totals game by game across his 126-game streak reveals another balanced distribution. Gilgeous-Alexander has scored exactly 20 points, 21 points, 22 points and so on, all the way to 42, at least once.
Total SGA single-game points during streak
Most of the time it clusters in the low 30s. His modal point total during his streak is exactly 30 points (13 times), followed by 31 (11 times), 35 (nine times), and 32 and 33 (eight times each).
14. Those point totals pale in comparison to Chamberlain’s, of course. The Big Dipper averaged 49.2 points per game during his record-breaking streak, compared to 32.5 for SGA. But Chamberlain also benefited from now-unheard-of playing time, as he averaged 48.4 minutes per game and was substituted in just three of 126 games. (In those games, he played 45, 40 and 36 minutes).
Gilgeous-Alexander, by comparison, has not reached 48 minutes in any game during his streak and has many more games with minute totals in the 20s (24) than in the 40s (five).
15. Calculating the two stars’ stats per 36 minutes to balance out the disparity in playing time reveals a much tighter contest: 36.6 points per 36 minutes for Chamberlain versus 34.4 for Gilgeous-Alexander.
16. One statistic where the two scoring superstars differ markedly is team success. Oklahoma City has gone 102-24 during Gilgeous-Alexander’s run, compared to the Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors’ 66-60 during Chamberlain’s.
17. In short, Gilgeous-Alexander is on pace to average over 30 points per game for the fourth consecutive season. The only other players in NBA history to accomplish this feat are Chamberlain (seven years in a row), Jordan (seven), Robertson (four) and Adrian Dantley (four).
18. The only players to average more than 30 points per game for four consecutive years and win a title during that period are Gilgeous-Alexander and Jordan.
19. Back to Gilgeous-Alexander’s current achievement: How far can his 20-point streak go? After all, Chamberlain’s streak was broken by chance, not by poor performance: after 126 consecutive 20-point games, he was ejected four minutes into game 127 after receiving two technical fouls for arguing a foul on a teammate. Immediately afterward, Chamberlain surpassed the 20-point mark for 20 consecutive games, failed once, and finally began his 92-game streak.
In other words, Chamberlain was just one ill-timed argument and a few rebounds away from an astonishing streak of 240 20-point games, which would have nearly doubled the current record.
20. Gilgeous-Alexander, on the other hand, does not pose a threat for expulsion, and has not come close to being sent off lately. Since returning from his injury in late February, Gilgeous-Alexander has averaged 30.8 points per game and has scored at least 26 in his five games.
It’s reasonable to expect his streak to end soon, considering the huge odds that it won’t even reach triple digits, much less continue indefinitely. Prior to its current streak, SGA’s longest 20-point streaks were 37 games in 2023, 29 games in 2024 and 20 games in 2023-24. He’s clearly improved as a scorer over the past two seasons, but many other all-time great scorers haven’t come close to 126 games, and counting, in a row.
But that’s all the more reason to appreciate Gilgeous-Alexander’s latest achievement. Matching any of Chamberlain’s multiple records is worthy of celebration.
