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 brief stints that somehow managed to be captured in basketball video games.

At this point, I’m sure that I sound like I’m on a constant loop whenever I refer to basketball video games as interactive almanacs. I can’t help it; it’s a fitting term that describes what it’s like to browse the rosters in an old release! Of course, games will vary as far as being an accurate resource. If nothing else, they can capture some very brief stints – and in some cases, phantom stints that didn’t result in any official on-court appearances – which may not be apparent if you don’t know your NBA history. To that point though, they’re still fascinating glimpses of the league at that time!

In older games, between revised releases, ports to different platforms, and publishers releasing games at various points during the season rather than everyone aiming for a pre-season launch, titles set in the same year – and even different versions of the same title – could easily feature inconsistent rosters. To me, that’s only made those games an even more entertaining window into the past, especially when they preserve some brief stints! Those can certainly occur in games that were released close to opening night, but games that were released later stood a better chance of capturing an even rarer stint that resulted from a midseason move. Here are five noteworthy examples.

1. Rasheed Wallace, Atlanta Hawks (NBA Ballers)

Now, I have covered Rasheed Wallace’s infamous single game stint with the Atlanta Hawks, though only after mistakenly declaring that it never officially appeared in a video game. For the sake of my ego, I’d like to discuss it in an article where I’m not fessing up to some blunders! Besides, it’s a fun and interesting situation, so here we go. As the Portland Trail Blazers sought to shed their “Jail Blazers” image, they began overhauling their roster. To that end, the Blazers traded Rasheed Wallace to Atlanta on February 9th 2004 in exchange for Shareef Abdur-Rahim. Sheed appeared in just one game for the Hawks, a 98-92 loss on February 18th to the New Jersey Nets.

A day after making his Hawks debut, Sheed was traded again, this time to the Detroit Pistons. It was a move that ultimately helped the Pistons upset the heavily favoured Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals, and had roster modders scrambling to make quick changes to their updates. Apparently the developers at Midway were doing the same thing, as Sheed appears on the Hawks in NBA Ballers. It’s clearly a late change as his jersey number and its position on his Hawks uniform are both incorrect. It also confirms that the rosters were locked between February 9th and 19th, ahead of NBA Ballers’ April 5th release. It’s one of the most unexpected stints you’ll find in a game!

2. Dominique Wilkins, Los Angeles Clippers & Danny Manning, Atlanta Hawks (NBA Live 95)

I’m going two-for-one here; something I’m certainly not above doing in The Friday Five! However, as Dominique Wilkins and Danny Manning were traded for each other, their brief stints with the Los Angeles Clippers and Atlanta Hawks respectively are forever intertwined in NBA history. To this day, it remains one of the weirdest blockbuster trades we’ve seen. It’s hardly unheard of for teams to part ways with a long-time star when their glory days together are winding down, but when Atlanta pulled the trigger on the Wilkins-for-Manning swap, they were on top of the East. Nique was reaching his mid 30s, yes, but his numbers were still All-Star worthy.

That’s not to take anything away from Danny Manning, who was a fine player when he was healthy. The trade didn’t exactly help the Hawks, who bowed out in the second round to Reggie Miller and the Indiana Pacers. It’s been pointed out that both Nique and Manning were set to be free agents, and the Hawks were wary of committing to their aging star while the Clippers weren’t keen to pay big money to keep theirs. In the end, Wilkins left the Clippers for the Celtics, while Manning went to the Suns. Hoops Analyst has a great retrospective of the situation, but as far as the virtual hardwood is concerned, these two brief stints can be seen and enjoyed in NBA Live 95 SNES.

This is because the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95 is basically set in 1994, with final 1994 season rosters. As such, it includes a few interesting stints, from brief tenures to familiar faces in unfamiliar places, and back in familiar places. It’s also missing a few stints that ended part of the way through the season, such as Mark Aguirre’s swansong with the Clippers. It’s a shame that Aguirre’s Clippers tenure didn’t overlap with Nique’s, as that would’ve been a fun duo in a video game, even at that stage of their careers! Nevertheless, Wilkins’ and Manning’s half seasons in LA and Atlanta are two of the most interesting brief stints you’ll find in NBA Live 95.

3. David Vaughn, Chicago Bulls (Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside)

Does anyone want to start a tally of how often I mention this, the cancelled trade in the arcade version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition, and Michael Redd being on the Dallas Mavericks in NBA Live 2003? It’ll be a close race, I’m sure! Honestly though, they’re some of my favourite basketball game roster trivia. That may sound surprising when it comes to David Vaughn’s appearance on the Chicago Bulls in Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside, but it’s up there with Rasheed Wallace’s Hawks stint as far as being unexpectedly included in an official roster. Even in an era where games were released after the season tipped off, such a brief midyear stint was unlikely to be accounted for.

Mind you, even as far as late releases are concerned, Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside is in a league of its own. Set in the 1998 season, its roster cut-off date was February 19th; the trade deadline. That allowed the Bulls’ trade of Jason Caffey to Golden State for David Vaughn to be included, but didn’t account for him being cut in March and latching on with the Nets. Of course, the game wouldn’t be released until April 27th in North America and June 10th in PAL regions (during the NBA Finals!), by which point it was extremely outdated. All the better for trivia though, capturing a snapshot of a brief stint that normally wouldn’t make it into the rosters of a basketball game.

4. Tom Gugliotta, Golden State Warriors (NBA Jam Tournament Edition & NBA Action ’95)

I dedicated an entire Wayback Wednesday feature to discussing Tom Gugliotta’s career and its impact on basketball video games, as he had a few brief stints that are interesting to reflect upon. His tenure with the Golden State Warriors undoubtedly stands out though, bridging his time with the Washington Bullets and Minnesota Timberwolves all in the one season. Less than a month into the 1995 campaign, Googs was traded to the Warriors in the deal that made Chris Webber a Bullet. The Warriors then traded him to Minnesota for rookie Donyell Marshall. He later noted that being traded early in his career left him without a sense of loyalty to any team.

As I spotlighted in my aforementioned article, Gugliotta’s journey can be seen in the different versions of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. In the original arcade release, he’s in Washington. In the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis versions, Googs has been moved to Golden State. Finally, in the PC and PlayStation releases, you’ll find him in Minnesota. As I’ve also discovered all these years later, NBA Action ’95 is another game that captured his brief Warriors stint. It’s one of the most memorable examples of how multiple ports and staggered releases end up capturing different snapshots of an NBA season, including brief stints such as Googs in Golden State.

5. Anfernee Hardaway, Miami Heat (NBA 2K8)

There are a number of ways to discover examples for listicle articles like this, but my favourite by far is serendipity. As a retro gamer and content creator, it’s extremely satisfying to be revisiting a game, only to notice some interesting roster trivia purely by chance; especially if it lines up with a topic that you’re already working on (doubly so if you can replace an example you weren’t totally happy with). That’s exactly what happened with Anfernee Hardaway’s stint with the Miami Heat early on in the 2008 season. I already knew about it and remembered it from working on NBA Live 08 PC roster updates back in the day, but I couldn’t recall if it had any official appearances.

It does! You’ll find Penny’s reunion with Shaq in South Beach in NBA 2K8, though he’s erroneously sporting his familiar #1 rather than the #7 he wore with the Heat. Seeing Hardaway on Miami’s roster in NBA 2K8 also cleared up a false memory that I had, specifically that his comeback occurred shortly into the 2008 season. He was actually an offseason signing, accounting for his inclusion in an official launch roster. It’s obviously many years since I was keeping NBA Live 08 PC updated, so I’ve likely mixed up the need to add him to its roster with him being signed after opening night. In any case, it was cool to discover that the stint did indeed make it into NBA 2K8.

Do you remember these brief stints and the games that preserve them? Can you recall any other brief stints that video games have captured? 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.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Brief Stints Captured in Games appeared first on NLSC.