TODAY’S SPORTSTAT-Wilt was the chairman of the boards
By JERRY TAPP
Detroit Pistons big man Andre Drummond had 27 rebounds in a game February 7 versus the Brooklyn Nets. It was the most rebounds in a game this season.
The 27-rebound game was Drummond’s sixth game of his career where he had 25 or more rebounds in a regular season contest. That ranks tied for 12th all-time in the league, but he’s light years away from the leaders in this category.
According to research on Basketball Reference.com, Wilt Chamberlain had 25 or more rebounds in 165 games in his career, most in the league. Here are the six players who top this stat category.
Most career 25+ rebound games
165-Wilt Chamberlain
125-Bill Russell
72-Nate Thurmond
69-Jerry Lucas
33-Dennis Rodman
16-Walt Bellamy
Since the 1999-2000 season, Drummond is second on the list with his six 25-rebound games; Howard tops the list with seven. Dikembe Mutumbo is third with four.
If we drop the number down to 20 or more rebounds per game, Drummond ranks 16th on the career list with 45 such games. Chamberlain again tops this category with 343 games with 20 or more rebounds in his distinguished career.
One more note: Of the 12 players with 50 or more career regular season games with 20 or more rebounds, all are in the Hall of fame except for Dwight Howard, who has 79 games and is still active.
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.