1962 NBA All-Star Game

Result

MVP: Bob Pettit

Box score

Bench (10+ points): Bill Russell (12), Willie Naulls (11)

Bench (10+ points): Jack Twyman (11)

Game context

The 1962 All-Star Game, played January 16 at St. Louis Arena, gave the host-city Hawks' own Bob Pettit a chance to headline in front of his home fans, and he delivered with 25 points and a game-high 27 rebounds as the West rolled to a 150-130 win, his second career All-Star MVP award (following his first in 1956) and a performance that further cemented his reputation as one of the era's most relentless rebounders. This was St. Louis's second time hosting the event, following its debut as host back in 1958, and the largest crowd yet for a game in the city — 15,112 fans turned out, well above the 12,854 who had attended four years earlier. The West controlled the game from wire to wire, building a 35-32 first-quarter edge that grew to 64-60 by halftime and 105-94 after three quarters before pulling away in the fourth for the 20-point final margin. It came during a season, 1961-62, remembered as one of the most statistically extraordinary in NBA history — the same season in which Wilt Chamberlain would score 100 points in a single regular-season game against the Knicks and average 50.4 points per game overall, and in which Oscar Robertson would average a triple-double for the full season. Both superstars were on the floor in St. Louis that January night, part of rosters that, even by the standards of an era stacked with future Hall of Famers, were unusually loaded with historically significant talent in the midst of authoring some of the most remarkable individual seasons the sport has ever recorded. Fred Schaus, the Los Angeles Lakers' coach after the franchise's relocation from Minneapolis the previous year, led the West bench, while Red Auerbach, continuing his string of Eastern coaching assignments during Boston's ongoing championship run, coached the East. Pettit's dominant rebounding performance on his home floor — outrebounding the field decisively for the second time in his career at this event — underscored his status, alongside Chamberlain and Russell, as one of the era's defining big men even as the individual statistical fireworks happening elsewhere across that same 1961-62 season (Chamberlain's 100-point game came less than two months after this All-Star Game, on March 2) tended to overshadow virtually everything else happening in the league that winter. St. Louis's crowd of over 15,000 for this game underscored the Hawks' standing, by that point, as one of the league's more consistently well-supported franchises outside the biggest coastal and Northeastern markets.

Sources

• Basketball-Reference — NBA All-Star Game History
• Basketball-Reference — NBA & ABA All-Star Game MVP (Kobe Bryant Trophy)
• Wikipedia — 1962 NBA All-Star Game