The 10 Best Triple-Double Performances in Recent NBA History

Each major sport seems to have a signature single-game accomplishment for individual players. Football has different yardage and touchdown thresholds for different positions. Baseball has the cycle for hitters and the perfect game (or no-hitter) for pitchers. Then there's hockey and soccer, who share the hat trick.

Basketball has 50-point games and double-doubles, but those are more common occurrences. Generally, the least likely of the top individual efforts has been the triple-double, when a player puts up double-digit marks in three different categories.

This achievement is reached most commonly by way of points, rebounds and assists, but they come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, blocks are involved. Sometimes, players score 40 points with 10 assists and 10 rebounds. Other times, we get a performance with 15 points, 15 assists and 11 rebounds.

No matter its form, nothing says dominance quite like a triple-double -- it means that while tallying stats in multiple categories, you put your mark on the game in so many different ways. But, how do we determine which triple-double performances have been the best over time?

Thanks to Basketball Reference, we have a way to answer that question, in the form of Game Score. Game Score is a rough measure of a player's productivity for a single game and is on a similar scale to that of scoring. For example, 10 is average and 40 is outstanding. And, back to the 1983-84 season (as far back as Basketball Reference has calculated Game Scores), these 11 triple-double games are the only ones to earn a Game Score of 42 or greater.

Who owns them? And, more importantly, who can lay claim to the single best performance among them?