Wayback Wednesday: The Lockout Rosters of NBA Live 96 16-Bit

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 rosters in the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96, which were affected by the 1995 lockout.

There have been four lockouts in the history of the NBA. We all remember the two big ones that happened in 1998 through early 1999 and in 2011, because they actually resulted in games being cancelled. Conversely, I’d suggest that fewer fans recall the lockouts of 1995 and 1996, as the former was resolved in time for the season to begin on schedule, while the latter lasted all of two hours before the league and the Players Association came to an agreement. As such, those stoppages ultimately weren’t as impactful or controversial.

Basketball gamers are well aware of the effects that lockouts had on the 1999 and 2012 season titles. However, the 1995 lockout impacted a few video games as well, including Konami’s NBA in the Zone, and NBA Live 96. The PC and PlayStation versions of NBA Live 96 were released late enough to include offseason moves and the new rookie crop, but the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions were released during the lockout, sticking them with outdated 1995 season rosters. As such, they capture an interesting moment in time. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Lockouts have never had a positive impact on basketball video games – with the arguable exception of providing Take-Two with an incentive to add NBA’s Greatest to NBA 2K12 – but there was an added complication with NBA Live 96 16-bit, as it was the year the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies joined the NBA. As two expansion clubs in their inaugural season, they had no 1995 rosters to carry over! This resulted in the inclusion of the Expansion Draft, which you won’t find in any other version of NBA Live 96. This allowed gamers to either manually or automatically populate the Grizzlies’ and Raptors’ rosters with players from the other 27 teams.

Contrary to what you may expect, the automatic draft option doesn’t mimic the real 1995 Expansion Draft, even though it had taken place prior to the lockout going into effect. Normally I’d suggest that this was a licensing issue, but NBA in the Zone does reflect those selections (and in doing so, includes a couple of phantom stints). In any case, it was a viable workaround that gave the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96 a fun exclusive. Infamously, the new Create-a-Player function allowed us to quickly add the missing rookies, along with Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and assorted retired Legends. The NBA wasn’t thrilled about that, but it was extremely convenient for us!

Far less convenient, however, was the need to complete the Expansion Draft before doing anything with the game. You can’t trade players and set lineups, start a Season, or even play an exhibition game, until the Grizzlies and Raptors have rosters. It makes sense of course, but it means that there’s no way to play NBA Live 96 for SNES or Genesis with the actual default lineups! You might think that you can just draft the Roster Players that become the created player slots, but they’re added to team rosters in place of the players that you draft to Vancouver and Toronto. On the plus side, the process of the Expansion Draft provides an opportunity to view the default rosters.

To that end, scrolling through to the San Antonio Spurs’ roster confirms that Moses Malone – whose career ended in December 1994 with a full court three-pointer – is still active in NBA Live 96 16-bit. Fortunately, since there was no NBA Action ’96, David Robinson is back, meaning Moses no longer starts in his place. Meanwhile, Dominique Wilkins and Xavier McDaniel are still with the Boston Celtics on SNES, though Wilkins isn’t in the Genesis version. Nique of course would have stints with the Spurs and Magic in 1997 and 1999, while the X-Man joined the Nets for the 1997 season, and spent half of the 1998 campaign with them before being cut in January.

Other veterans in the roster include Johnny Dawkins, Sam Bowie, Winston Garland (father of Darius Garland), Sleepy Floyd, Tree Rollins, Danny Ainge, Tom Chambers, and former Slam Dunk champion Kenny “Sky” Walker, on the Detroit Pistons, Los Angeles Lakers, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Jersey Nets, Orlando Magic, Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and Washington Bullets respectively. Out of that batch of players, only Chambers would play in the NBA again, having brief stints with the Charlotte Hornets and Philadelphia 76ers in 1997 and 1998. In the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96 however, the lockout kept all of those veterans active for the virtual 1996 season.

Interestingly, although they had occurred before the 1995 offseason and subsequent lockout technically began, a number of trades weren’t accounted for. Hersey Hawkins and Kendall Gill are still with the Seattle Supersonics and Charlotte Hornets, despite being traded for one another in June. Notably, that deal was accounted for in the PC and PlayStation versions of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. However, the trade that sent Rex Chapman from the Bullets to the Miami Heat wasn’t included in NBA Jam TE or NBA Live 16 16-bit. Likewise, the swap of Tyrone Corbin and Spud Webb between the Atlanta Hawks and Sacramento Kings didn’t make the cut in either game.

Again, this is noteworthy because other games that were affected by lockouts still managed to sneak in moves that were made during the Playoffs, at the Draft, or in late June before the next offseason officially began. Perusing the 1995 season transactions listing, we can actually pinpoint the rosters being accurate as of April 15th at the very latest, as Howard Eisley is still with the Spurs on Genesis, and Rafael Addison is still with the Pistons in both 16-bit releases. This makes it slightly more up to date than NBA Live 95 PC, but not quite a true end-of-season roster. Given the uncertainty of the lockout, it might’ve been the most stable update to the rosters of NBA Live 95.

While I’m touching on roster differences, the Genesis version actually includes an inactive roster, whereas the SNES version retains the 12-man lineups. This means that in addition to removing Dominique Wilkins, there are a few extra and/or different deep bench players on some teams. Compared to the two 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95 however, their rosters are far more similar. Both versions of NBA Live 96 16-bit include a few players who ended up playing in 1996 but unfortunately missed the cut for the PC release, such as Terry Cummings, Gary Grant, Anthony Bowie, Trevor Ruffin, and LaSalle Thompson. They were subsequently re-added in the PS1 version.

Obviously, the big moves of the 1995 offseason aren’t accounted for. That means you’ll still see Dennis Rodman sporting #10 on the Spurs, while Will Perdue remains in Chicago. Mark Price is still with the Cavaliers, where he can team up with the not-yet-retired Brad Daugherty, active on Cleveland’s bench. Alonzo Mourning and Glen Rice haven’t swapped teams yet; indeed, that was a late deal that the developers managed to squeeze into the PC version. Dan Majerle remains a Sun, awaiting the trade for “Hot Rod” Williams that resulted in a single season stint with the Cavs. Veterans Terry Porter and Sam Mitchell haven’t yet joined the Timberwolves.

Strangely, Harold Miner is wearing #10 for the Heat. He’d given up his #32 to Billy Owens the previous season, but switched to #4 when he did so, as seen in the 1995 Dunk Contest. He seems to be the only player with an incorrect number, so it’s likely just one of those oversights that would sometimes happen before developers had all of the readily-accessible resources that are now at their disposal. There are also a few players with incorrect positions, though given that this includes familiar mistakes such as James “Hollywood” Robinson being a point guard and Dontonio Wingfield being a power forward, I’d suggest that some of them are intentional to facilitate rotations.

With the lockout ensuring that the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 96 would ship with 1995 almost-end-of-the-season rosters, it preserves a snapshot of the league before some big changes. Beyond major deals such the aforementioned trades of Dennis Rodman for Will Perdue and Alonzo Mourning for Glen Rice, there are some teams that were nearing the end of their run. That includes a Nuggets squad led by Dikembe Mutombo and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. The Derrick Coleman/Kenny Anderson Nets basically ended in 1995. Once again, the Class of 1995 is missing, though they can be easily added along with the perennial holdouts, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.

At the same time, there are lineups that will be quite familiar to fans of the NBA in the 90s: the Supersonics with Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, and Detlef Schrempf; the Jazz with Karl Malone, John Stockton, and Jeff Hornacek; the Magic with Shaquille O’Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, Nick Anderson, Horace Grant, and Dennis Scott; the Pacers with Reggie Miller, Rik Smits, and Mark Jackson; and the Knicks with Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, and John Starks, to name just a few. Yes, the game had to forego 1996 season rosters, and there’s quite a bit of work to do if you want to update it, but the lineups are jam-packed with nostalgic squads that still had life left in them.

Between the outdated lineups, Expansion Draft, hidden players, and an inability to immediately play with the default rosters, the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 96 are strange, but also enjoyably unique releases. In an era before official patches and roster updates were feasible on any platform other than PC – and still extremely rare at that – they provided viable workarounds to create 1996 season lineups. They even extended a few careers, and kept big names around for fun, fictional scenarios. It may not have been an ideal situation, and the PC and PS1 versions were definitely superior across the board, but NBA Live 96 16-bit handled the lockout as well as we could hope.

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