Barton Silverman/The New York Times

A little over two years ago, Mark Titus, then a seldom-used reserve forward for the Ohio State Buckeyes, started writing a blog that quickly became an Internet sensation. Titus and two of his bench mates named the blog Club Trillion as a nod to the games in which they would play one minute and register zeros in every other box score category.

Although Titus’s blog brought the Trillion to a larger audience, the term has been around for quite a while. According to the longtime Philadelphia 76ers statistician Harvey Pollack, the former N.B.A. player Scott Hastings came up with the name in the 1980s.

Hastings’s definition of a Trillion allowed for more than one minute played, and Pollack later amended the definition, writing in his annual statistical yearbook that “a committee voted to allow a player to join the club if he only had a personal foul.”

For the purposes of this column, players with more than one minute played will be considered, but players who had a personal foul will not.

(For the pedants out there, yes, Trillion is a misnomer. Sources vary, but most modern box scores have minutes played along with 15 other statistics, so Quadrillion would be the proper term. But we’ll stick with the colloquial version.)

Using a database going back to the 1986-87 season — the earliest season available with complete boxes — the career leader in Trillions is Jud Buechler with 55. Buechler was a 6-foot-6 swingman who played for seven teams, most notably the Chicago Bulls, in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Buechler was a sort of human victory cigar for the 1996, 1997 and 1998 N.B.A. champion Bulls, recording 25 Trillions (45.5 percent of his career total) in those three seasons.

While Buechler is the career leader, the runner-up, Mario West, may be the standard-bearer of the Trillion Club. West, a former guard for the Atlanta Hawks, who is now playing in the D-League, has 51 career Trillions.

More impressive, almost a third of his career games resulted in a Trillion, the highest ratio since 1986-87. To put that number into perspective, only 7.6 percent of Buechler’s career games ended with a Trillion.

West also has the highest single-season total in that time span, putting up 24 Trillions in the 2007-8 season alone. The next closest total is 20, by Minnesota’s Anthony Carter in 2004-5.

Among active players, Steve Novak of the Dallas Mavericks, a fifth-year forward out of Marquette, is the career leader with 39 Trillions. He has registered a Trillion in 19.5 percent of his career appearances, the highest rate among active players with at least 10 Trillions (the runner-up, Darnell Jackson, is well behind, at 14.4 percent).

While Novak is undoubtedly the current president of the Trillion Club, he does not have the “largest” Trillion among active players; that somewhat dubious honor belongs to Chris Duhon. On Jan. 20, 2007, Duhon, now with the Magic, played 10 minutes for the Chicago Bulls versus the Utah Jazz without recording another box score statistic. The president emeritus of the Trillion Club is Kenny Walker, who took the floor on Dec. 11, 1993, for 12 minutes while the scorekeeper’s pencil remained behind his ear.

The largest Trillion put up so far this season occurred on Thanksgiving, when the rookie Willie Warren of the Los Angeles Clippers put up a string of goose eggs (or should that be turkey eggs?) in his 9 minutes against the Sacramento Kings.

In a way, these two examples highlight some of the deficiencies of the traditional box score because one would assume that those players had to be doing something measurable on the court given that much playing time.

With an assist from Mark Titus, “Trillion” has become a familiar term in a basketball fan’s vocabulary. And although the Trillion is little more than a piece of trivia, its influence on Titus’s postcollegiate career has been far from trivial: thanks to the popularity of his blog, Titus has been a contributing writer on men’s college basketball for ESPN.com and is now writing a book.

Justin Kubatko is the creator of Basketball-Reference.com, an online basketball encyclopedia. He is also a statistical consultant for the Trail Blazers.