Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five things – namely saves or other data and content – that I carelessly lost in various games.

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It’s an old adage that’s been lamented in the music of Joni Mitchell and the band Cinderella alike. The sentiment usually refers to more important things in life than video games, but since that’s what we cover around these parts, I’ll appropriate it for this occasion. After all, while I think we can and should acknowledge that other losses are far more significant in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a bummer when we lose save files, data, and other content in video games. Life goes on, but it sucks to have all that progress go up in smoke.

It’s bad enough when it occurs due to a glitch in a game, but at least you can turn your anger and frustration outwards towards the developers and publisher. When you’ve carelessly done something that’s resulted in your progress being lost, it’s tougher to shift the blame onto somebody else! Even if there’s something clunky in the game that’s partly to blame, you’re stuck with the knowledge that it could’ve been avoided if you were just the teeniest bit more careful. The times when I’ve been careless with my save files are undoubtedly among my biggest regrets as far as basketball gaming is concerned. Here are five things that I’ve lost due to a lack of care and foresight.

1. MyCAREER Save in NBA 2K17 (PS4)

I’ve spent over 2,800 hours with NBA 2K17 on PlayStation 4, thanks to playing a full season in MyCAREER, and 500 games of 2K Pro-Am. It’s easily one of my favourite releases in the NBA 2K series, and that MyCAREER is likewise one of my favourite basketball gaming experiences. Obviously there’s no way I can revisit the fun I had with NLSC THRILLHO outside of the videos I captured, but in theory, I’d be able to dust off that MyCAREER save. Sadly, that’s not possible. Owing to the small HDD of the original PS4 and the size of the games, I had to remove them to make room for new ones. I kept NBA 2K17 as long as possible, but eventually I needed the space.

After I came by a spare external drive, I was able to reinstall some games. When I reinstalled NBA 2K17 PS4 to capture some screenshots, I discovered that it has some corruption issues with existing saves. I managed to get everything working again, but after uninstalling it and reinstalling it another time, I accidentally retrieved an older version of my MyCAREER save from the cloud storage. That was bad enough, but I lost access to the save completely when I failed to reinstall the game again before the servers were shut down, meaning I can’t get the required data to convert it into an offline file. It’s not entirely my fault, but I’ll admit to some carelessness on my part.

2. The Dream Team in NBA 2K17 (PS4, then PC)

This one hurts because I knew that it could happen, and yet I still carelessly allowed content to be lost. That content is the pre-order bonus Dream Team in NBA 2K17, in both my PlayStation 4 and PC copies of the game. As I mentioned above, as my PS4 HDD began filling up, I deleted games that I was done with for the moment, and NBA 2K17 eventually fell into that category. It wasn’t until I’d reinstalled the game a couple of times that I finally tried to play with the Dream Team again, only to notice that they were no longer available. Fortunately, I’d never uninstalled the PC version, so I was still able to play with them there. Unfortunately, I’ve since messed that up, too.

Ironically, I lost the Dream Team in NBA 2K17 PC while searching for a way to get them back in the PS4 version. I installed the game on my laptop, but neglected to put Steam into offline mode before launching it. This new installation of NBA 2K17 tried to sync with my desktop saves, threw up an error stating they were corrupt, and then updated my MyPLAYER Account. Not only was the Dream Team absent in the new installation, but when I fired up NBA 2K17 on my desktop, they were gone, and my saves had lost their names. This highlights the issue with making pre-order content unlockable via Locker Codes. Once the serves are offline, that functionality is lost.

3. Sprite Dunk Package in NBA 2K14 (PS4)

That brings me to the next example of content that I’ve lost: one of the Sprite Dunk Packages in the PlayStation 4 version of NBA 2K14. Those packages were likewise unlocked via a Locker Code, and again, that functionality is no longer available now that the servers are offline. While playing through MyCAREER in NBA 2K14, I acquired a few new dunk packages, and went to assign them. I carelessly assigned one of them to the preferred dunk package slot, and immediately lost the Sprite package that I’d previously chosen. The other two that were still assigned remained, but the one I’d replaced was nowhere to be found in the list of available dunk packages.

Now, there is a possibility that I could get this back. I’ve played through NBA 2K14’s MyCAREER on PlayStation 5, so it’s possible the data is still intact on PS4. Even if it is though, restoring that file would eliminate the progress that I made on PS5. Since I’m still playing that MyCAREER game, I’d rather have that progress than the Sprite dunk package that I carelessly lost. It still stings though, because I could’ve easily avoided losing it with just a little more care and attention to what I was doing in the animations menu. As with my NBA 2K17 MyCAREER save file and the Dream Team, my regret was immediate, knowing it was avoidable and couldn’t be undone.

4. EA Sports Bio Progress & Dynasty Save in NBA Live 2004 (PS2)

Of course, regret for carelessly lost files and data isn’t always felt until years later. A prime example is the progress that I made in the EA Sports Bio in the PlayStation 2 version of NBA Live 2004. I actually spent a considerable amount of time playing NBA Live 2004 on PS2 while modding on PC, as I’d started my Dynasty on the former while waiting for the latter to be released. As such, my on-court success and the hours I’d accumulated allowed me to level up significantly, unlocking all of the rewards that I was entitled to along the way. Admittedly, I did pad the hours slightly by leaving the game idling here and there, but I did legitimately play most of them.

All these years later however, I have nothing to show for all those hours with NBA Live 2004. Although I still have the same copy of NBA Live 2004 PC, at one point I sold my copy of the PS2 version along with other games I was no longer playing, as I needed some extra cash. I never counted on becoming a collector many years later, or feeling the need to revisit an old game that I was sure I was done with. I also needed room on my memory card, and with the game no longer in my collection, it seemed pointless to keep my saved data. I’ll cut myself some slack on this one, but along with my NBA Live 2002 Franchise that I carelessly lost, it’s a basketball gaming regret.

5. A Bunch of Shoes in NBA 2K20 MyTEAM

Finally, we come to an example that has a silver lining. First of all however, I have to explain that while I don’t have OCD, I am particular about clearing notifications. It bugs me to see a notification that I can’t clear or have to clear constantly, which was an issue in NBA 2K21’s MyTEAM as it had a couple of annoying bugs in that regard. I’d already encountered a similar glitch in NBA 2K20, in which I couldn’t clear the notification indicating that I had new shoes in my collection. In the end, I went ahead and sold all of the shoes, only for the notification to remain! And then, I noticed the button that automatically cleared notifications, without needing to view each item.

As I said though, there’s a silver lining here. In this instance, my only regret is that I wasted time when the “clear notifications” function would’ve fixed the bug (not to mention previous time wasted on clearing notifications one by one). I’m not a fan of consumables in MyTEAM, and I only ever mess around with shoes when assigning them (or now creating them) is an item on the Agenda. Because I’d stockpiled several shoes in NBA 2K20, my selling spree also netted me a respectable amount of MT to spend in the Auction House. I don’t regret squandering temporary consumables in a mode that will one day be inaccessible, but it’s carelessly lost content all the same.

Have you ever lost progress or content in a basketball video game due to a moment of carelessness? Have you ever been fortunate enough to have a backup on hand? Let me know in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.