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Wayback Wednesday: Playing With Defunct & Relocated Teams

Wayback Wednesday: Playing With Defunct & Relocated Teams

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the defunct and relocated teams that are fun to play with in older games.

If it isn’t obvious from producing a weekly Wayback Wednesday feature, as well as playing old favourites with Dee4Three on Parsec and discussing them on the NLSC Podcast, I love revisiting basketball games from multiple eras, and bringing them back into my gaming rotation. Sometimes I get on an extended kick with a game, as is the case with NBA 2K14 for PlayStation 4, while other titles I just like to throw on for an exhibition or two. Whether I’m playing solo or with Dee, those exhibition games always raise an important question: who to play with, and against?

Obviously, our favourite teams – the Chicago Bulls and Boston Celtics – will always be an option. Of course, there are some Bulls and Celtics teams throughout time that aren’t as fun to play with, while other teams are far more intriguing. However, more and more, I find myself being drawn to the defunct, relocated, or re-branded teams in older basketball video games. Let’s take a look back…way back…

When Dee and I revisited the Xbox 360 version of NBA Live 06 on a whim one day, he asked which team I’d like us to use for our co-op session, and who I’d prefer us to face. I chose the New Jersey Nets for us, and the Seattle SuperSonics as our opponent. It’s impossible not to be drawn towards the Sonics while playing a game set before the 2009 season, especially if you’re our age. We have fond memories of the Sonics with Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, and also remember Ray Allen’s run in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle always had such distinct branding, and of course, the city’s loss of the team to Oklahoma City stands as one of the biggest injustices in NBA history.

Defunct & Relocated Teams: New Jersey Nets & Seattle SuperSonics (NBA Live 07)

Sure, there’s been a retro Sonics team in NBA 2K since The Jordan Challenge brought us the 1996 squad featuring the aforementioned Kemp and Payton. That duo is also in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, and they’re one of our go-to choices as we play through Road Trip. Dee is also using them while playing through a season with Stildo33 in NBA 2K19 using the 1995 season mod. It’s not that we can’t use the Sonics in newer titles, and mods naturally open up even more possibilities. There’s something fun about playing with them in a scenario where they are officially included as an active club though, rather than just being a classic team celebrating a noteworthy squad.

It’s that interactive almanac aspect of old basketball games that I’ve mentioned on so many occasions. Again, I’m not downplaying the importance of including classic teams in NBA 2K, or the fantastic work seen in comprehensive retro roster mods. Still, there’s authenticity in jumping into an old game and playing with or against an active Sonics team in a matchup with one of their contemporaries, which games after 2008 and roster mods can’t quite capture. It’s that snapshot of NBA history, preserved on the virtual hardwood. How can you pass up the opportunity to control or take on a team that represents a nostalgic era in your basketball fandom, but no longer exists?

The same goes for the New Jersey Nets, the team that Dee and I chose to use against the Sonics. While the Nets have relocated whereas the Sonics are technically defunct even with the Thunder sharing their history for now, the Brooklyn Nets still feel like a different entity to their New Jersey counterparts. They heavily re-branded, adopting black and white as their colours in contrast to the old red, white, and blue. Despite the relocation occurring over a decade ago, it still feels recent, whereas the New Jersey Nets predated the NBA’s explosion in popularity in the 80s and 90s. The games that I grew up with featured the New Jersey Nets, just as they did the Seattle SuperSonics.

Shareef Abdur-Rahim on the Vancouver Grizzlies in NBA Live 2000

The Vancouver Grizzlies are also on that list of defunct or relocated teams. While the Grizzlies didn’t spend nearly as much time in their original home as the Sonics and Nets did theirs, there’s nostalgia to them all the same. I’ve mentioned before how much I love the jerseys of the mid to late 90s, and the Grizzlies had some extremely distinct branding! Along with the Toronto Raptors, they were the new teams entering the league as my basketball fandom was kicking into high gear. Also, whereas the Nets and Sonics have classic teams in NBA 2K, the Vancouver Grizzlies don’t. That makes them immediately appealing in old games, even when their lineup doesn’t!

There’s also appeal in the teams involved in the Hornets and Pelicans lineage. As much as people have sneered at the Charlotte Bobcats name, it stuck around long enough to be memorable, and undergo a couple of branding overhauls. I’ll always remember the original logo and orange jerseys as the Bobcats became the first new team since the mid 90s, bringing the number of teams to an even thirty and leading to the six divisions we have today. Even if the Bobcats moniker didn’t ever become popular among NBA fans, we at least got used to it. It’s fun to put them on the floor in basketball video games from the 2005 season right up until the 2014 campaign.

As for the New Orleans Hornets, who are now retroactively the 30th NBA team and part of the Pelicans lineage while the Bobcats’ and Hornets’ histories have now been combined, they’re nostalgic as well. It feels quite strange to call Chris Paul a Pelicans Legend and to see him on their All-Time squad in newer NBA 2K games, yet he obviously doesn’t belong on Charlotte’s team. The Hornets’ relocation in 2002, a year after the Grizzlies moved, was a huge deal. They’d been one of the most popular teams in the 90s with iconic branding, but the New Orleans Hornets were around long enough to be memorable. They also had a unique jersey to use in NBA Live 10!

Kwame Brown on the Charlotte Bobcats in NBA 2K11

Although the Charlotte Hornets are back in the league and their lineage now includes their original run and the Bobcats years, the first incarnation of the team is appealing to play with when retro gaming. Obviously there was even more incentive to use them when the latest game included the New Orleans Hornets and the Bobcats – or indeed, the one year we had the Pelicans and Bobcats – but there’s still something special about the original Hornets, even if they’re technically no longer defunct or relocated. Like the Sonics, we do have a classic Hornets team in NBA 2K, but it’s fun to use those old lineups against an entire league of contemporary opponents, without mods.

Again, it’s that snapshot of the league – that history that we can interact with – that makes it so enjoyable to play with defunct and relocated teams. If I want to play with the Bulls, I can do that in any basically any game I want. That’s not to say that I have no interest in playing with the Baby Bulls when I revisit a title from the mid 2000s, but I already did that plenty of times back in the day. Even if I do use them, I’m more likely to select a defunct or relocated team as my opponent. They represent a league that no longer exists, except in records, archival footage, and of course, video games. It makes them an obvious pick when trying to select the most interesting squads.

I’ll also throw the Washington Bullets out as an example, although their 1997 name change means that they were already the Wizards in a majority of the games that are nostalgic for me. I’m perhaps not as quick to use them when I revisit games like NBA Live 95 through 97, or NBA Jam Tournament Edition, but as they were the first team to re-brand after I became a keen basketball fan and follower of the NBA, the Bullets moniker still takes me back. It was fun to see their old jerseys when I made the “Ode to the 90s” NBA Live 10 mix, as well as discovering they have the same alternate venue court bug as the Los Angeles Clippers in NBA Live 96 PC’s Season mode.

Kevin Durant on the Seattle SuperSonics in NBA Live 08

While unique branding and wistful nostalgia for an NBA long gone does play a role in being drawn to defunct and relocated teams in old games, some of them did indeed have fun lineups. Those Nets of the mid 2000s featuring Jason Kidd, Vince Carter, and Richard Jefferson, are a blast to run fast breaks with. Even though the mid 90s Sonics with The Reignman and The Glove are more memorable, the squads with Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis are fun, too. Like the Raptors, the Grizzlies had some good young players in their formative seasons, including Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Bryant Reeves, and Mike Bibby. They’re underdog teams that I didn’t play with as much.

I’d suggest that’s a major factor as well. Now that they’re defunct or relocated, using those teams feels like paying tribute to, or showing appreciation for, teams that we no longer have; at least in the same form. Because I was more likely to use the Bulls, or a fun team with ample star power such as the Sacramento Kings in NBA Live 2002 or the Minnesota Timberwolves in NBA Live 2003, I seldom used underdog and lottery-bound teams (except when that label applied to the Bulls). Even though none of those defunct and relocated teams were favourites of mine, I still feel some sense of loss not having them in the NBA. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, and all that.

Mind you, it’s not always that deep. If you can’t decide which team to use for a quick exhibition game, any criteria that helps you make a choice is useful. Novelty is as valid a reason as any other, and a team that is defunct or has relocated in the years since a game was released is certainly novel. Throw in a lineup that’s built for fun on the virtual hardwood, as well as some cool branding, and those teams become obvious choices. Still, there’s no ignoring the historical significance and nostalgia that comes with an NBA that’s now out of reach. Thanks to video games serving as interactive almanacs, we can resurrect defunct and relocated teams from the ghosts of memory.

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DiamondDust132
DiamondDust132
October 19, 2023 1:39 am

Great article. I do miss the Vancouver Grizzles. Great logo, but they had no good teams, so I guess that’s the reason 2K never makes a retro team of them. And the Sonics, of course are classic. Using a combination of URB mods and heavy REDMC usage, I sometimes like to ‘relocate’ the Sacramento Kings to Seattle (sorry Kings fans. Nothing personal). I’ve got an NBA 2K13 franchise now where I can do wacky things like Thunder vs. Sonics. Good stuff.

Also New Orleans Brass still feels like a wasted opportunity. Pelicans is fine and all, but Brass really does sound so much better. Maybe they thought it sounded too much like Jazz, but if we can have a team called the Magic and another the Wizards, I don’t see why not.