Within a week of Joel Embiid’s 70-point outburst, Luka Doncic also hit the 70-point mark. He scored 73 points against the Atlanta Hawks yesterday to lead the modern scoring pack in a single game for active players. In this wake, Kevin Garnett recently expressed his belief that someone is going to get 100 points soon. However, his friend and former Boston Celtics teammate Paul Pierce vehemently disagreed with him on the topic.
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During his basketball live series KG Certified, Garnett was wondering which one would happen first-whether a team would get to 200 points or an athlete would score 100 points.
In response to the query, Pierce said, “Ain’t nobody ever going to get 100.” He added, “It ain’t enough minutes in the game.” This response didn’t go down well with KG.
Garnett pointed out how Embiid got to 70 points in just 37 minutes and had he played for 48 minutes, he could have had a crack at getting near to 100 points. He argued that if there was an overtime and it was a close game, the Philadelphia 76ers star would have gotten 13-15 extra minutes to get to 100.
Meanwhile, Pierce replied, “Nobody is getting 30 points in a quarter.” The 46-year-old reasoned that by the time someone had scored 70 points, they would be inconsistent and fatigued. Already having exhausted their energy, they’d find it difficult to keep both their mental and physical radar spot on. Garnett then argued that a couple of people, Wilt Chamberlain and Klay Thompson to be exact, had already scored 30+ points in a quarter.
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Pierce then solemnly declared that “we won’t be living” when the 100-point mark is attained by an individual. But Garnett was confident in his prediction, he was using both modern and historical examples. He held on to the belief that we are going to see a player score 100 and a team crack the 200-point mark soon. Despite that, the Truth was unfazed in his belief that we would never see a player score 100 in a single game.
The 2008 NBA Champion even joked that the NBA would have to increase the total number of minutes and introduce the four-pointer for a player to score 100. But KG wasn’t having any of it.
Pierce’s notion has been challenged in the current era of limitless scoring. Within a year, we have seen four players drop 70 points or more. Considering Luka Doncic’s recent 73-point performance, the 100-point barrier doesn’t seem far away from being broken.
Can we soon witness a 100-point single-scoring night?
At the beginning of 2023, Damian Lillard and Donovan Mitchell both scored 71 points in a space of less than two months. Apart from these two, in 2017, Devin Booker also had a 70-point night in a loss to the Celtics. Considering the spacing and the lack of congestion in the paint, the scoring realm has opened up in the league. Owing to that, sharpshooters are honing their craft from deep range to become a triple-threat.
This has facilitated the rise of pull-up three-point shooters who can also employ a sleek driving and mid-range game. This is a craft at which Lillard, Booker, Mitchell, and Doncic excel. They become tough covers because they also have terrific ball-handling mechanisms, which aid their crafty finishes and off-the-ball game.
Apart from that, 7+ footers who can run the rim hard and finish inside have also benefitted a lot as well. Giannis Antetokounmpo, who has had a 60+ point performance recently, can also someday breach the 70 points mark. Meanwhile, versatile post-player Embiid has been the reigning scoring leader in the league for 2+ seasons. His ability to get inside buckets easily and his smooth jump-shooting game have thrown off defensive Centers. The 29-year-old’s surprising speed for a Center and agile finishes have also helped him to get to 70 points.
He is the only player behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain to score 30+ points and grab 10+ rebounds in more than 15 games consecutively. KG is putting his money on Embiid to get to the storied landmark of 100 points set by Wilt Chamberlain more than six decades ago. Can he break Chamberlain’s 60+ years record of 100 points? Only time will tell.
