NBA Quiz

Hershey, Pennsylvania, March 2, 1962. A converted arena next to a chocolate factory, 4,124 people in the seats, and a game nobody in New York bothered to broadcast. That is where Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points — the single most quoted fact in any NBA quiz, and the one almost everybody misunderstands. There is no footage. Not a frame. What survives is a partial radio call and a photograph staged in the locker room afterward. Basketball history is full of these gaps, and they are exactly where a trivia quiz stops being about memory and starts being about what you actually know.

The Most Famous Game in Basketball History Was Never Filmed

The belief: everyone has seen clips of Wilt's 100-point night. The reality: no video or film of the game is known to exist. The Philadelphia Warriors had moved that particular home date to Hershey to grow the market, the Knicks were a bad draw, and no television crew made the trip. A recording of the fourth quarter exists only because a Philadelphia radio broadcast was preserved.

The photograph everyone pictures — Wilt holding a scrap of paper with "100" scrawled on it — was taken in the locker room after the fact, at a photographer's suggestion. It is a re-enactment, essentially, and it has stood in for the game itself for more than sixty years.

Two details from that night are far better trivia than the number 100. Chamberlain shot 28-for-32 from the free throw line, which is absurd for a career 51% foul shooter — he made more free throws in one game than he did in some full weeks. And the final score was 169-147, which tells you something important about the era that the next section spends more time on. If you want the full box score and the surviving accounts, the Wikipedia record of the 100-point game collects them in one place.

The NBA Didn't Start in 1946, and It Didn't Start in America

The belief: the NBA was founded in 1946 in New York. The reality: what was founded in 1946 was the Basketball Association of America. The NBA name did not exist until August 3, 1949, when the BAA absorbed its rival, the National Basketball League. Ask someone the founding year and they will say 1946 with total confidence, which is why that question is worth three points on this quiz and not one.

The first game is the better story. November 1, 1946, Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto: the New York Knickerbockers beat the Toronto Huskies 68-66. The league's opening night happened in Canada, in front of a crowd that had been advertised to with a promotion offering free admission to anyone taller than the Huskies' 6-foot-8 center. Toronto folded after that single season, and the city waited 48 years for the Raptors.

Here is why this matters beyond trivia night: the 1946-49 window is the single most reliable place to separate a casual fan from a serious one. Championships from those years are BAA titles that the NBA counts retroactively — which is how Philadelphia and Baltimore ended up in a record book most fans have never read.

Bill Russell Has Zero Career Blocked Shots

The belief: the record book covers the whole history of the league. The reality: half of it starts in 1973. Blocks and steals were not official NBA statistics until the 1973-74 season. Neither were offensive and defensive rebounds as separate categories. Turnovers followed in 1977-78.

The consequences are genuinely strange. Bill Russell — the most celebrated shot blocker who has ever lived, a man whose entire defensive reputation was built on erasing shots at the rim — has an official career block total of zero. So does Wilt. Jerry West has no steals. When the quiz asks for the career blocks leader, the answer is Hakeem Olajuwon at 3,830, and that is not a judgment about Hakeem versus Russell. It is a judgment about when somebody with a clipboard started counting.

Football fans will recognise the shape of this problem — sacks were not official in the NFL until 1982, which is why Deacon Jones is missing from a list he would otherwise lead. Our NFL quiz builds a whole question around that same gap. Any sport that started counting late has a record book with a hole in it.

The triple-double is a related case. Nobody used the term until the early 1980s, when a Lakers public relations staffer started tracking Magic Johnson's lines and coined a phrase for them. Oscar Robertson's 1961-62 season — 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds, 11.4 assists — was recognised as a season-long triple-double retroactively. At the time it was just Oscar having a year.

The Arc Has Moved, and Almost Nobody Mentions It

The belief: the three-point line has always sat at 23 feet 9 inches. The reality: it did not exist until 1979-80, and the NBA shortened it to a uniform 22 feet for three seasons in the mid-nineties before moving it back.

The line arrived as a borrowed idea. The ABA had been using it since 1967 and the NBA adopted it partly as a novelty — Boston's Chris Ford hit the first one on October 12, 1979, and for years afterward coaches treated the shot as a gimmick for desperate situations. Then from 1994-95 through 1996-97 the league pulled the arc in to 22 feet all the way around, hoping to boost scoring. Three-point attempts jumped roughly 50%, the shooting looked artificially good, and the league quietly moved it back.

This is the detail that ruins naive era comparisons. Career three-point percentages spanning the mid-nineties include three seasons taken from a line nearly two feet closer in the corners. When someone tells you a 1996 shooter was more efficient than a modern one, the arc itself is doing part of the arguing.

Is This Really the Highest-Scoring Era Ever?

Everyone says modern basketball is the highest-scoring the game has been. It is a reasonable thing to assume — the threes, the pace, the rule changes protecting shooters. It is also wrong, and it is wrong by a wider margin than most fans would guess.

In 1961-62 the average NBA team scored 118.8 points per game. No season since has matched it. The 2023-24 league, widely described as an offensive explosion, sat around 114. The gap is not about skill. Teams in 1962 played at a pace closer to 126 possessions a game against defenses that had no three-point line to guard, no illegal defense rules worth mentioning, and shooting standards that would embarrass a modern rotation player. More shots, worse shots, higher totals.

That is the useful frame for the whole record book. Wilt's 50.4 points per game in 1961-62 is a real, unbreakable record, and it also came in a season where he averaged 48.5 minutes a game — more than regulation, because he played the overtimes too. Both things are true. The quiz asks you for the number; understanding the context is what stops you from misusing it in an argument later.

Here's What Actually Happened When Jordan Got Cut

The belief: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. The reality: he was a 5-foot-10 sophomore at Laney High School who was placed on junior varsity instead of varsity, which is what happens to most sophomores. The coach kept a taller player, Leroy Smith, because the varsity team needed height. Jordan then averaged something close to 25 points a game on JV, grew four inches, and made varsity as a junior.

Jordan told the story himself for decades because the sting was real, and the motivational version — superstar rejected, superstar proves everyone wrong — is much better copy than "promising sophomore develops on schedule." But the myth has a cost. It gets used to argue that talent evaluation is hopeless, when the actual lesson is narrower and more interesting: a coach made a defensible roster decision about a 15-year-old and had no way of knowing the kid had four inches coming.

Draft history is full of the honest version of this. Kobe Bryant went 13th in 1996 and twelve teams passed. Nikola Jokic was the 41st pick in 2014, announced during a Taco Bell commercial. Giannis Antetokounmpo was a 15th pick nobody had properly scouted. Those are real evaluation misses, and they are all quiz questions worth more than the Jordan myth ever was.

Why This Quiz Scores in 1s, 2s and 3s

Most basketball trivia gives you a percentage, which flattens everything. Naming Giannis and knowing which team won 19-18 in 1950 are not the same accomplishment, and a quiz that treats them identically is telling you very little.

So every question here is a shot from somewhere on the floor. Layups are worth a point: the Greek Freak, Wilt's 100, the Lakers' Minnesota origin. Mid-range questions are worth two: the assists record, the Jazz relocation, Phil Jackson's ring count. And the threes — worth three — are the ones that separate people: the 1949 merger, the 19-18 game, the official blocks leader, the team that drafted Kobe.

Twenty-four questions, 48 points available. The 24 is not arbitrary either — it is the shot clock. Danny Biasone, who owned the Syracuse Nationals, arrived at the number in 1954 by dividing a game's 2,880 seconds by the 120 shots he thought a watchable game should contain. Before that, the 19-18 final in question six was a legal, if miserable, way to win a basketball game. Britannica's history of basketball covers how close the professional game came to stalling itself out of existence.

The results screen also splits your score by era — 30 points come from the league before 2000 and 18 from the years since. Almost everyone is lopsided. That split is the most useful thing the quiz tells you, because it names the decade you should go read about.

Every Result on the 48-Point Scale

🪑 Deep Bench (0-11 points). You converted a handful of layups and little else, which usually means basketball reaches you through highlights and finals rather than full seasons. Nothing here is a knock — the pre-1980 questions ask about a league that stopped being visible decades ago. The upside is unusually steep: five facts from this article roughly doubles this score.

👟 Rotation Player (12-20 points). The most common landing spot for someone who watches the playoffs. You know the current stars and the famous numbers, and you lost nearly everything worth two or three points. The gap is almost always history rather than the modern game, and it is a narrow gap — the 1946 versus 1949 distinction alone is three points.

🔥 Sixth Man (21-28 points).Streaky range, real knowledge. Scores here come from cleaning up the modern era and splitting the older questions. You will have gotten the Warriors' 73 wins and the Bucks' 1971 title but missed Fort Wayne or the blocks record. Genuinely good, and one reading session from the next tier.

⭐ All-Star Starter (29-36 points).This is the score of someone who has read about the league, not just watched it. The mid-range is gone entirely and you are hitting roughly half your threes. What separates this from All-NBA is pre-1960 administrative history — the merger, the first game, the shot clock's arithmetic.

🏆 All-NBA First Team (37-43 points).Elite, with one cold zone. Nearly everyone here missed exactly one of three questions: the 1949 name change, the 19-18 game, or Kobe's draft team. You carry the record book and the era context around with you, which is rare enough that you should stop apologising for winning arguments.

🐐 Hall of Fame Ballot (44-48 points). Roughly two players in a hundred finish here. Clearing 44 means you converted the deep questions, which requires knowing that the record book has a 1973 boundary and that the league had two names before it had one. At this point you are not a fan taking a quiz; you are a fan checking whether the quiz is any good.

Six Answers Worth Committing to Memory

If you only take six things from this page, take these: the league became the NBA in 1949, not 1946. Its first game was in Toronto. Blocks and steals have only been official since 1973-74, which is why Russell has none. The three-point line arrived in 1979-80 and was shortened for three seasons in the mid-nineties. The highest-scoring season in league history was 1961-62, not last year. And Kobe was drafted by Charlotte.

Those six facts are worth 14 points on this quiz — nearly a third of the board, and enough to move most people up two full tiers. They are also the six that reliably win arguments, because they are the ones confidently repeated wrong. If recognising logos and silhouettes is where you scored best, the logo quiz runs the same recognition muscle across a few hundred brands, and the movie quiz will tell you whether the Jurassic Park answer was knowledge or a lucky guess. And if it was the pre-1980 history that hooked you rather than the modern game, the soccer quiz is built almost entirely out of it — a rule change from 1925 that lifted scoring by a third, a World Cup with no final, and a trophy recovered by a dog. The MLB quizgoes back further than either: baseball's career ERA leader threw 464 innings in a single 1908 season, and its career batting average record only changed hands in 2024.