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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 players that served as replacements for missing stars.
“Hold on a moment”, I hear you say. “Didn’t you already cover Roster Players in a previous Wayback Wednesday feature?” I did indeed, and I do also link back to that article whenever I mention them! However, I’m not actually focusing on those old roster players today, except to note that yes, they did serve as the replacements for a handful of real players that couldn’t be licensed back in the 90s. Not every game made use of placeholders to fill in for absent stars, however. So, what did they do when they couldn’t include the likes of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and Shaquille O’Neal?
Enter the replacements: other players on the team that were promoted to the starting lineup in order to fill the void. This produced some interesting results, such as career bench players getting the starting nod, and the occasional player being slotted in at a position they rarely played. It also resulted in other players taking on the role of the team’s de facto star. It’s not something we need to worry about these days, but back in the 90s, it was a recurring phenomenon. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Let’s start with Scottie Pippen, who often replaced Michael Jordan, figuratively and/or literally on the Chicago Bulls. With His Airness being a perennial holdout, Pip was The Man for the Bulls, much as he was during MJ’s first retirement. In sim games like NBA Live, he’d be the go to guy for the user and CPU alike. In NBA Jam, he was the default choice for Player 1 when selecting the Bulls. Beyond being their top player though, in a handful of games – including NBA Full Court Press – Pip was actually placed at shooting guard. This usually meant the promotion of Toni Kukoc to starting small forward, though other games started the Croatian Sensation at the two instead.
While we’re on the subject of the Bulls sans MJ on the virtual hardwood, NBA Live 96 PC opted for a different approach. Steve Kerr, who never started a game during his tenure in Chicago, was inserted into the starting five as the Bulls’ point guard. Ron Harper was left at shooting guard, with the newly acquired Dennis Rodman starting alongside Pippen in the frontcourt, and Luc Longley in the middle. With Jud Buechler and Randy Brown on the bench, Kerr was the ideal choice to fill in at point guard in lieu of a Roster Player. Inaccurate though it may have been, it was arguably better than having Scottie Pippen or Toni Kukoc play out of position, as some games did.
Charles Barkley caused similar lineup oddities with the virtual Phoenix Suns. In the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95, both A.C. Green and Cedric Ceballos served as the replacements for Sir Charles. Green started 55 of the 82 games he played that year, while Ceballos started 43 of his 53 games. By starting together in NBA Live 95, they effectively replaced Charles Barkley, who had started in all 65 games he played that year. It also thrust Dan Majerle or Kevin Johnson into the role of top scorer. In the PC version of NBA Live 95, Green started alongside Danny Manning, who in reality only started in 19 out of the 46 games he played during an injury-plagued 1995 season.
This arrangement was retained in NBA Live 96 PC, a season in which Manning went on to play just 33 games, starting in four of them. Manning also became the default Player 1 option in NBA Jam Tournament Edition; Barkley had already been removed from the second revision of the original NBA Jam. As for the Western All-Stars, Karl Malone stood in for Sir Charles, starting alongside Shawn Kemp in a couple of the NBA Live games from the mid 90s. David Robinson was also replaced on the West All-Stars in NBA Live 95 PC by the game’s only Roster Player. Meanwhile, on the San Antonio Spurs, an aging Moses Malone started at centre instead of The Admiral.
For a couple of years, Shaquille O’Neal was exclusive to NBA Live. As such, he was everywhere he needed to be in NBA Live 96 and NBA Live 97, but other games from that era required a replacement. In the aforementioned NBA Full Court Press, Shaq was replaced in the Orlando Magic’s lineup by Jon Koncak – who did in fact start 35 games when Shaq was injured that year – and in the Eastern All-Stars’ starting five by Patrick Ewing. Karl Malone once again replaced Charles Barkley in the West’s lineup. Full Court Press also used a Roster Player on the East in place of Michael Jordan – similar to David Robinson in NBA Live 95 PC – but Reggie Miller became the starter.
As you can see, the absence of star players caused a lot of shuffling of lineups! In NBA Jam TE, Shaq’s absence also meant that it was a toss-up between Horace Grant, Anfernee Hardaway, and Nick Anderson as to who was the star of the Magic. David Robinson’s only absence came in the PC version of NBA Live, so the Spurs continued to field their best possible duo in NBA Jam. Yao Ming’s absence from the PlayStation 2 version of NBA Live 2003 – a result of him signing his rookie contract after the cut-off date – made Kelvin Cato the Rockets’ starting centre by default, as the only other centres were Jason Collier and Kenny Thomas (who was actually a power forward).
I’ve mostly been focusing on NBA Live and NBA Jam so far, with a few examples from NBA Full Court Press, but other games had their own replacements as well. Konami’s NBA in the Zone 2 was a game that started Toni Kukoc in place of Michael Jordan, though there was also “M. Guard” – a Roster Player that ended up getting Konami into trouble – available on the bench. Charles Barkley was replaced by Kevin Willis, and also had his own Roster Player among the reserves. The Lakers had it the worst by default, with Shaquille O’Neal’s Roster Player on the deep bench, and Sean Rooks as the man in the middle. Notably, the Class of 1996 rookies were also absent.
Its predecessor, the first NBA in the Zone, featured similar substitutions. Similar to its forerunner, NBA Give ‘n’ Go, NBA in the Zone is more of a 5v5 arcade game, with five man rosters for each team. In that game, the Suns once again feature Green and Manning in place of Barkley, with Malone replacing him on the West. Shaq is once again replaced by Koncak on the Magic, and Ewing on the East All-Stars. The Bulls meanwhile have a very odd lineup comprised of Scottie Pippen, Toni Kukoc, Steve Kerr, Pete Myers, and Will Perdue. Incidentally, B.J. Armstrong was on the Raptors, making him yet another player who only played for a certain team in a video game.
The result of using such replacements is that those games aren’t a particularly accurate snapshot of the NBA during that season. They’re still interactive almanacs, but they’re missing some context. If you used them as a reference for retro roster mods – as many of us did back in the day – you’d definitely have to cross-reference with other sources; something that’s now much easier with sites like Basketball Reference. Back in those days of course, many of us learned more about the NBA and its players from video games, especially when it came to the names of some seldom-used reserves. There’s a reason why I remember so many players from the 90s, despite them never being stars!
Most other games from that era opted for Roster Players to stand in for missing stars or unsigned rookies. As former NBA Live developer Dave Warfield explained to us, faced with the choice of excluding big names entirely, or providing gamers with a viable stand-in that allowed the team to have a sense of completion, they opted for the latter. As I’ve previously discussed, this approach ultimately came in handy with the PC releases, providing a ready-made player for us to overwrite. They were arguably less convenient on consoles where they couldn’t be renamed, or removed from the roster if you created replacements for them with real names and more accurate faces.
These replacements are memorable substitutions, not only for the oddity/inaccuracy of the situation, but because year after year, we’d fire up the games hoping to see the previously missing players finally included, only to find a Roster Player or teammate in their place. Outside of the occasional substitution on NBA 2K’s retro teams – such as the ’00 Blazers and ’04 Pistons, which are both missing Rasheed Wallace – it’s not something we see nowadays. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever see it happen again with any current players, making it yet another unique aspect of older basketball games that’s fun to look back on now, but unquestionably an arrangement that belongs in the past.
