Tag Archives: Dikembe Mutombo

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of five more players who only appeared on certain teams in video games.

It’s time for Part 2 of a topic I’ve previously covered here in The Friday Five: players who appeared on certain teams in video games, but not in real life. As I said last time, one of the fun parts of revisiting old games is seeing a snapshot of the NBA as it was when they were current, and recalling players’ forgotten stints with various teams. In doing so, you can also discover oddities such as players appearing on the rosters of teams that they never actually suited up for in real life. Although these look like mistakes, there are several reasons why it happens.

As I noted in my previous article, these include early roster cut-off dates and deals made later in the offseason, deals that are voided, and injuries that put players on the shelf for the entire time they’re with a particular team. Roster cut-off dates aren’t an issue anymore thanks to official updates – and we could always make updates to the rosters ourselves – but due to the aforementioned circumstances, some players will still only ever suit up for a particular team on the virtual hardwood, while being little more than a name on the roster/payroll in real life. Once again, I find trivia like that to be quite interesting due to the different back stories, so here are five more examples!

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at the introduction video for NBA 2K12.

Although NBA 2K11 was a tough act to follow, I would suggest that NBA 2K12 was up to the challenge. Continuing to improve upon the gameplay of its predecessor, it also successfully expanded the historical content we’ve come to associate with the NBA 2K series. The Jordan Challenge gave way to NBA’s Greatest, a mode featuring fantastic production values and several of the best teams in the NBA history on top of MJ’s Bulls. The game was hampered by the absence of the Class of 2011 rookies at launch owing to the lockout, but official roster updates would later resolve that issue.

Firing up NBA 2K12 for the first time immediately got you in the mood to play with the new historical teams, with an introduction video that I once ranked as the best among basketball games. Although we’ve seen some slick intros in the years since, there’s still a strong case for NBA 2K12’s boot-up remaining in the top spot. As such, I thought I’d look back at it this week, and the real highlights that inspired several moments in the intro. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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