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 ways to improve MyNBA Eras.

MyNBA Eras is one of the most impressive modes in the history of basketball video games. The ability to wind back the clock and start a franchise game in previous eras, with the league evolving with expansion, re-branding, and even different rules and formats, is a concept that once seemed impossible. As is the case with any historical content in sports video games, there are obviously limitations. Licensing and likeness rights are the biggest issue, so if nothing else, we can expect to see some placeholders standing in for players who can’t be included.

Beyond that, I never want to downplay the hard work that has gone into creating a mode that so many of us fantasised about, but never expected to see. With that being said of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t critique MyNBA Eras, or suggest ways in which it could be better. It certainly helps that the framework is already in place, and generally speaking, the mode functions as intended while making the most of its huge but incomplete roster of historical players. Hopefully Take-Two can continue to work with the NBRPA to add those missing players, but in the meantime, there are some improvements that can be made to the content and experience that’s already on offer.

1. More Accuracy With Player Ratings & Tendencies

I have to give some credit where it’s due. In the wake of Dee pointing out a plethora of issues with historical player ratings and tendencies a few years back, it appears that some of the most egregious errors have been corrected. Unfortunately, there are still a host of inaccuracies with the historical teams and players, from the classic squads to the rosters in MyNBA Eras. The list is too long to get into all of the specific examples here, but one of the biggest problems is how those historical players have severely undercooked athletic attributes. Players who had great speed and leaping ability are too often incredibly sluggish, and unable to soar to the rim as they did in real life.

There are issues with skills such as shooting and dribbling as well, but even players whose ratings are fairly accurate in that regard aren’t fun to play with because they run and jump like seniors in a local rec league! Many of them have ill-fitting animations, especially jumpshots and dunk packages, impacting how they feel on the sticks and detracting from the authenticity. Considering the aim of MyNBA Eras, authenticity should be the point, yet the mode is currently coming up short in that regard. There needs to be much more care and accuracy when it comes to player ratings, tendencies, animations, and so forth. Without that authenticity, MyNBA Eras isn’t nearly as fun.

2. Wider Array of Era-Specific Team Branding

The fact that the mechanics are in place to automatically update team branding as the years go by is one of the most impressive features of MyNBA Eras. It’s something that we haven’t been able to achieve with all of our fantastic retro season mods over the years. Unfortunately, there are some issues with accuracy here as well. Some of the team branding doesn’t change when it should, or the logos, jerseys, and courts are mismatched. The branding tends to be broadly accurate and there are some minor changes that aren’t vital to represent, but the inaccuracies do stand out to anyone who knows their NBA history…which is the primary audience for MyNBA Eras, after all!

As such, I’d like to see a wider array of era-specific courts, logos, and jerseys added to MyNBA Eras, with teams adopting the appropriate branding at the right juncture. As I said, there’s some wiggle room here as far as very minor changes. Whenever a design can feasibly represent a larger span, for the sake of simplicity and disk space, I’m fine with a jersey or logo being mostly accurate for a majority of the seasons it’s used for. It’s when a team keeps their old branding for too long, switches to new branding too early, or keeps outdated courts and jerseys while updating their logo, that the lack of authenticity really becomes bothersome. It’s something that I’d like to see improved.

3. Make Placeholders Less Prominent

Once again, I have to give credit where credit is due. Over the years, more and more historical players have been added to NBA 2K, and the rosters of MyNBA Eras have been fleshed out since the mode debuted in NBA 2K23. It appears that 2K is keen to work with the NBRPA in order to keep adding players, so hopefully we’ll continue to see the benches filled out and the fictional placeholders removed. I’ll also reiterate my desire to see Take-Two “CTC” to get the likes of Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Rasheed Wallace into the game! For now though, there are some improvements that can be made to how those placeholders are handled in the MyNBA Eras rosters.

Basically, I think they need to be less prominent. I understand the logic behind giving them unique names rather than the multiple clones of Michael Davis, David Miller, John Brown, and James Smith that have padded out the benches of the classic teams in older games. Nevertheless, it’s distracting when those legally-distinct placeholders end up playing significant minutes for CPU-controlled teams. There are solutions here from managing those teams to creating accurate rosters, but that is time and effort that not everyone can spare. The placeholders are necessary to make the mode work, but it’d be better if they took more of a backseat and rarely showed up during gameplay.

4. Provide Additional Starting Points

While I love watching highlights from the first Chicago Bulls threepeat and earlier on in Michael Jordan’s career, as someone who became a hardcore basketball fan circa 1995-1996, my nostalgia is for the second threepeat. To that point, while it’s fantastic that we can turn back the clock to 1992 to play with prime MJ and the early 90s Bulls, I’d love to be able to start in the 1996 campaign. Indeed, a wider selection of starting points in MyNBA Eras is something that I’m keen to see. The ones that we have make sense for the most part, and I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth here. Still, having a bit more flexibility is one way that MyNBA Eras could be made even better.

Obviously there are some hurdles here. As it is, there are issues completing the rosters for the starting seasons that are already available. Even putting that aside, expecting a pre-made roster for every season beginning with the 1984 campaign is a big request! We discussed the idea in the NLSC Discord though, and the suggestion was made that additional starting points could be added along with the option to use custom rosters, thus leaving it up to the community to fill in the gaps. With the framework that’s in place, offering this sandbox approach alongside the ready-made scenarios would be the most feasible way of allowing a MyNBA Eras game to begin in a different season.

5. Expand the History Recorded in MyNBA Eras

Like previous franchise modes in NBA 2K – and the career modes for that matter – MyNBA Eras keeps track of results and records throughout the years, adding them to the real NBA history that’s there by default. Specifically, we can view the previous award winners, single game and season records, career statistics, and a list of all the NBA Champions and their opponents. That’s all well and good, but if you want to view more detailed results from previous seasons, unfortunately you’re out of luck. Since this is something that keen franchise gamers want to do, it’s a bummer that we can’t readily access a virtual NBA history through an in-game Basketball Reference!

Admittedly, we might be running into a technical limitation here. In order to keep the size of save files manageable, certain data is discarded or abridged whenever a new season is started. This has been a recurring solution in franchise modes in both NBA 2K and NBA Live over the years. It avoids things getting messy with the code and design of a mode that’s already rather complex. Still, if there’s a way to at least be able to access regular season standings, Playoff results, and maybe the top ten leaders in statistical categories in previous years, it’d be a great addition to MyNBA Eras. It’s worth throwing out there as a suggestion, while acknowledging the technical issues.

What do you think of these ideas? What suggestions do you have to make MyNBA Eras even better? Have your say 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.