What is the most points scored by one player in an NBA game?

How to get close to this number

Reason from a modern game. A team scores somewhere around a hundred and fifteen points, and an exceptional individual performance is fifty to sixty. A single-game record has to exceed that substantially, and a round number just above a team's typical total is where it sits.

The era is what makes the record possible. The game in 1962 was played at a far higher pace with many more possessions and almost no defensive specialisation, so individual scoring ceilings were much higher than the modern game allows. This is a record that cannot be broken because the sport that produced it no longer exists.

The absence of footage is the detail that makes it strange: no recording of the game survives, and only around four thousand people were present. The most famous individual performance in the sport's history exists only in box scores and recollection — and far more people claim to have been there than the arena held.