{"id":682311,"date":"2026-05-20T05:15:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/682311\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T05:15:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T05:15:12","slug":"ranking-the-25-best-single-game-nba-playoff-performances-of-the-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/682311\/","title":{"rendered":"Ranking the 25 Best Single-Game NBA Playoff Performances of the Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Game 1 of the 2026 Western Conference Semifinals, we witnessed Victor Wembanyama’s official entry into the “best player in the world” conversation.<\/p>\n

Considering his age (22) and the season he just had, we might have even seen some of the bigger individual steps he’s taken toward Michael Jordan and LeBron James in the greatest-of-all-time race.<\/p>\n

Against a juggernaut defense that’s ranked first in that category in each of the last two seasons, Wemby went for 41 points on 14-of-25 shooting, grabbed 24 boards, blocked three shots and handed out three assists.<\/p>\n

His huge night got us thinking: Was that the best playoff performance of the 2000s?<\/p>\n

To answer that question, we took each of the top 100 playoff games of the era by game score<\/a> (“a rough measure of a player’s productivity for a single game”), gave them lots of credit for that game score, gave them lots of credit for the level of defense the player faced, gave a dash of credit for the end result (was it a win or a loss?), and gave a dash of credit for the location of the game (was it at home or on the road?).<\/p>\n

We tossed those factors into the statistical blender, churned it on high and poured out the following top 25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Game 1 of the 2026 Western Conference Semifinals, we witnessed Victor Wembanyama’s official entry into the “best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":682312,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":["post-682311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=682311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/682312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}