Thousands of games, one-of-a-kind scores: Inside NBA 'scorigami'

March 2, 1963, lives in NBA history as the day Wilt Chamberlain dropped 100 points. On March 2, 2025, another statistical nugget joined the Big Dipper's.

The matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs ended 146-132, the 3,159th unique final score in NBA history and 14th this season. Or, in other words, a "scorigami."

The NBA's recent increase in scoring has opened the door for point totals never seen in the league's near-80-year history. Hakob Chalikyan wanted to make sure those factoids didn't go unnoticed.

Inspired by the NFL scorigami account, Chalikyan launched the NBA version in September. The 70,000-plus scores in NBA history are stored on the site he developed, scorigaminba.com. It also includes totals from the Basketball Association of America, a league that existed from 1946 to 1949 before merging with the National Basketball League to become the NBA.

The X account, NBA_Scorigami, posts scores daily, alongside how many times a specific result has happened and the last time it occurred. The Boston Celtics, Portland Trail Blazers and Utah Jazz are among the franchises that follow the account.

Chalikyan, 25, said it's easier to achieve a never-before-seen final score in the NBA compared to the NFL (which has 1,091). That led him to wonder whether the NBA version would be popular. More than 35,000 followers later, it's clear fans of quirky score outcomes aren't picky.

"It's still pretty fun because you could see ... different eras have different types of scores," Chalikyan told ESPN. "So now in the era we're in, scores are getting so high where you're just going to see scores that never happened before. I think that's still pretty fun, and I think that's what people like."

The origins of scorigami date back to the mid-2010s. As part of a series called "Chart Party," Jon Bois of SB Nation's Secret Base, introduced the term in September 2014, initially spelling it "scoragami."

"Scoragami is a word I just invented, and it refers to the act, and art, of producing a final score in a football game that has never happened before," Bois wrote.

Bois, who didn't respond to requests for an interview, told ESPN's Mina Kimes in a 2021 SportsCenter feature that after writing the post, people slowly began pointing out unusual scores to him on social media.

Two years after the written piece, he brought it to video form, analyzing a chart of NFL scores while pointing out the most interesting ones. Dave Mattingly then created a Twitter page in 2017 equipped with a bot to track all of the scores.

"I took literally a weekend, built the algorithm, learned the Twitter behind the scenes [of] what I would need to do in order to post the tweets," he told Kimes. "And I just put it out there and then figured that no one would ever see it."

Eight years later, the account boasts nearly 500,000 followers, establishing a corner of the internet for rooting for unique scores during the NFL season. An accompanying website -- developed by Andrew Merriman -- includes a chart of every score in NFL history. The X account and website are separate from each other and Bois.

Merriman and Mattingly have had a few conversations, and Mattingly helped Merriman with bits of his code. Merriman said he has never spoken with Bois but that he wouldn't have made the website without Bois' original video.

"It is really cool to get a new unique score in any sport," Merriman told ESPN. "So the NBA version is just as interesting as anything else."

Chalikyan knew about NFL scorigami and always wondered why an NBA version didn't exist. Though other accounts had attempted to put one together, Chalikyan thought he'd be the person to do it properly.

He began that process roughly three years ago, gathering and storing data on every game in NBA history. But he said he wasn't skilled enough to make a website and publish it.

That led to scorigami hitting the shelf until further notice.

"I sort of went away from it for a few years," Chalikyan said. "But this past summer before the season started, I was like, 'Hey, I'm pretty good with this type of technology now, so I could probably just go back and take that data and make the website,' but then I realized I had lost all the data."

Chalikyan had to start from scratch.

He wrote code and instructed it to visit NBA.com, using the website's API -- an application programming interface, which is "a set of rules or protocols that enables software applications to communicate with each other to exchange data, features and functionality," according to IBM -- to gather the data.

It went year by year, team by team and pulled scores that were then stored in a private database. Chalikyan called it a "pretty automated" process that took three days.

Once he had the data, he transitioned to building the website.

The X account soon followed, though another issue arose -- someone beat Chalikyan to it.

"I actually made an account, and then I saw that somebody else had made an account maybe like two, three weeks prior to that," he said. "And they had about 18,000 followers, and I was like, 'What?'"

Ethan Peterson had a similar vision. Inspired by the NFL account, he, too, decided to create an NBA version. He originally hoped to start it manually before figuring out how to automate the account, which he said he doesn't have the necessary experience for.

Peterson posted on Sept. 16, 2024, that the NBA scorigami X account was being launched. Ten days later, Chalikyan reached out, explaining that he had the same idea and a project to show.

"I'd gotten a DM from Hakob, saying that he also created one, and he was wanting to collaborate," Peterson told ESPN. "And I was like, 'Hey, yeah, that sounds great. With my announcement that I was going to run this account, it'd be awesome if we could get your bot that you created to help post on this account.'"

When Chalikyan approached him, Peterson said he thought, "Well, I can help him show off this code that he created, because this account already has so many followers."

Welcome to NBA Scorigami!This account will be dedicated to tracking new scoring combinations in NBA history, regular season and playoffs.

There have been 3,004 unique scores in NBA history, 27 of which came in the 2023-24 season! pic.twitter.com/rpb8Bx2tHm