Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in one NBA game on March 2, 1962, in a game played in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He scored 23 in the first quarter, had 41 at halftime and added 28 more in the third quarter, and he made 36 of his 63 shots and 28 of his 32 free throws.

As of 2026, only two players, Kobe Bryant in 2006 and Bam Adebayo in 2026, have come within 20 points of Chamberlain's 100-point record, and the last time a new name had been on top of the NBA's career points list before 2023 was April 1984, when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar passed Chamberlain, and Abdul-Jabbar kept scoring with his sky-hook until he retired in 1989, at age 42.

On February 7, 2023, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,387 career points to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer, and as of November 2026, Basketball-Reference's table of NBA and ABA career points lists LeBron James first with 43,580 points and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar second with 38,387.

A teacher named James Naismith invented basketball in 1891. The game that these players scored in began as a short list. Naismith's original rules were typed up the morning he introduced the game and hung in the gym, and he wrote on it, “First draft of Basket Ball rules. Hung in the gym that the boys might learn the rules—Decr 1891.” The 13 original rules were published in January 1892 in the Springfield College school newspaper, The Triangle, and the two-page typescript of those rules was sold at auction in December 2010 for $4.3 million.

James Naismith was born on November 6, 1861, in Almonte, Ontario, and died on November 28, 1939, and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, in Springfield, Massachusetts, the city where basketball was born, was founded in 1959, and in 1985, a larger Naismith Hall of Fame opened in Springfield with high-tech exhibits, and women were inducted for the first time.

Women's basketball took a different road to the same game. Smith College's Senda Berenson created new rules for women to discourage roughness, dividing the court into three equal sections and requiring players to stay in their section, and a committee led by Berenson made her three-court rules the standard for women when they were published in 1901 by Spalding Athletic Library, with five to 10 players on a side. In women's college rules, the five-player, full-court game and the 30-second clock were made official in 1971-72, so the women's game came almost back to the game designed by Naismith.

The NBA Board of Governors approved the WNBA on April 24, 1996, and the WNBA announced eight teams for its first season: Charlotte, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, Sacramento and Utah. The first WNBA game was played on June 21, 1997, and the Houston Comets became the first WNBA champions, beating the New York Liberty 65-51 behind Cynthia Cooper and a suffocating defense. The Connecticut Sun joined the WNBA in 2003, when the Mohegan Tribe became the first non-NBA owner in league history.

The three-point line is a younger idea, and it was doubted at first. The NBA adopted the three-point shot for the 1979-80 season, and many teams and players thought it a publicity stunt; Boston's Red Auerbach said, “I say leave our game alone.” Chris Ford of the Boston Celtics made the first three-point shot in NBA history on Oct. 12, 1979, in the first quarter of a game against the Houston Rockets. The NCAA adopted the line for men's college basketball on April 2, 1986, at 19 feet, 9 inches, and teams tried only 9.2 threes a game and made 3.5 in the first full season.

The NBA's three-point line is 23 feet, 9 inches from the middle of the basket, and 22 feet from the basket in the corners, while as of the 2025 WNBA rulebook, the WNBA three-point arc is 22 feet, 1 3/4 inches from the middle of the basket, a shorter distance than the NBA's, and in 2004 the WNBA had moved its three-point line from 19 feet 9 inches to 20 feet 6¼ inches and widened the lane from 12 feet to the NBA's 16 feet.

The federation behind the world game began small. FIBA, the international federation, was founded on 18 June 1932 in Geneva, Switzerland, with eight founding members: Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland. On April 8, 1989, the FIBA World Congress decided to eliminate the distinction between amateurs and professionals, making all basketball players eligible for FIBA competitions. FIBA had 212 national basketball federations as members as of January 2026, with its headquarters in Mies, Switzerland.

The first Olympic basketball games were played on August 7, 1936, in Berlin, outdoors on clay. The final between the United States and Canada was played in a downpour, just eight points were scored in the second half, and the United States won 19-8 for the first Olympic basketball gold medal. Basketball had made its Olympic debut as a demonstration sport at the 1904 Games in St. Louis, before becoming an Olympic medal event for men in 1936.

The United States won the first seven Olympic men's basketball gold medals, through 1968, with a 63-game winning streak, but in 2004, Argentina, led by Manu Ginobili and Luis Scola, beat the United States in the Olympic semifinals and then won the gold medal in Athens, and France beat the United States in the group stage of the Tokyo Olympics, ending a 25-game U.S. Olympic winning streak, but the U.S. went on to win gold.

Women's basketball joined the Olympic program at the 1976 Games in Montreal, where Pat Summitt co-captained the U.S. team before coaching Team USA to gold at the 1984 Games, and as of August 2024, the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team has a 61-game winning streak going back to the 1992 Barcelona Games, the longest in the history of either U.S. Olympic program.

Words to know

• typescript: typed pages
• halftime: mid-game break
• amateurs: unpaid players
• federation: group of groups
• suffocating: very tight
• inducted: formally added