On January 20, 1967, Wilt Chamberlain did something that sounded impossible even in an era built to flatter giants. Against the Los Angeles Lakers, the Philadelphia 76ers’ center took 15 shots and missed none. A perfect 15-for-15 night that, at the time, set the NBA record for most made field goals in a game without a miss. It wasn’t a novelty line, either. Chamberlain paired the flawless shooting with 32 points, 30 rebounds, and nine assists in a 119–108 Sixers win.
The record itself was impressive. What followed was absurd.
Within the same season, Chamberlain didn’t just protect that mark, he treated it like a warm-up. On February 24, 1967, in Baltimore, he went 18-for-18, still the NBA record, scoring 42 points with 30 rebounds and 10 assists as Philadelphia routed the Bullets 149–118. Less than a month later, on March 19, he authored another perfect-shooting masterpiece: 16-for-16 against Baltimore again, scoring 37 in a 132–129 win.
Three perfect nights. All on 15 or more shot attempts. All in a two-month span. ESPN’s historical biography puts it plainly: Chamberlain is the only player to do that: 15-for-15, 16-for-16, 18-for-18… and he did it in 1967, when every defense in the league knew exactly where the ball was going.
It’s tempting to treat those box-score lines as party tricks from a different NBA, the black-and-white league where the pace was frantic and the talent pool was smaller. But Chamberlain’s perfect streak in 1967 is more interesting than that, because it arrived during the most strategically sophisticated season of his prime, the year he pivoted from pure scoring dominance to something closer to total control.
The 1966–67 Sixers weren’t asking Wilt to be a soloist. They had a deep, talented roster and a championship target that required beating Bill Russell’s Celtics. Chamberlain responded by becoming a more purposeful passer and a more selective scorer, the kind of shift that makes his perfect-shooting games feel less like volume stat-chasing and more like the cleanest possible execution. When the shot profile is mostly high-percentage looks, post seals, layups, dunks, quick hooks created by angles and strength, perfection becomes at least imaginable. What makes Wilt’s run historic is that “imaginable” still rarely becomes “real,” even for centers living at the rim.
And Chamberlain wasn’t just perfect in isolated games. During that same stretch in February, he also set the NBA record for most consecutive made field goals, a run of 35 straight made shots from February 17–28, 1967. That’s the larger context: he wasn’t flipping heads on a coin. He was locked into a zone where misses practically stopped existing.
The Lakers game on January 20, the one that began this record story, reads like a blueprint for how Chamberlain did it. Fifteen makes on fifteen attempts, but also nine assists, proof that he wasn’t simply forcing shots until the streak became a headline. The Baltimore record game on February 24 looks even more like a complete domination of environment: 18 makes, 30 rebounds, 10 assists, and a 31-point win. Even the 16-for-16 on March 19 sits inside a competitive, tight game, which makes the perfection more striking: it wasn’t garbage-time efficiency. It was flawless scoring under real pressure.
Modern fans are trained to think of “record efficiency” as a perimeter concept, someone going 10-for-10 from three, or a guard scoring 50 on a handful of shots. Chamberlain’s 1967 perfection is the opposite kind of skill flex. It’s the efficiency of inevitability: the ability to get to the same spots repeatedly, against set defenses, and finish without slippage. For any big man, the hard part isn’t making 15 straight shots in an empty gym. It’s doing it while bodies lean, arms slap, legs fatigue, and the game keeps pulling you into contact.
That’s why these records have held their aura for nearly six decades. The NBA has changed its rules, its spacing, its shot distribution, its training methods, its athlete profiles, and yet no one has topped 18-for-18 without a miss in a game.
