Wayback Wednesday: Jersey Swaps for Future Stints in NBA Live 95
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 going back to NBA Live 95 to trade players and create jersey swaps that represent future stints.
If you played either of the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95 back in the day, you’ll know that roster customisation is extremely limited. We can only trade players in Season mode, and even then, only the five starters for each team are available to swap. This is because the game only includes portraits for the starters, so any trade that placed a bench player in the starting lineup would result in an inconsistency in the presentation. For the same reason, we can’t change our starters prior to the pre-game introductions, though we can actually pause and substitute them just before tip-off.
On the bright side, whenever we make trades involving the starters, their jerseys will be changed to reflect their new team. Whereas the PC version used (for the time) high resolution Media Day headshots and thus had static portraits, the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95 placed player heads on an assortment of matching shoulders. Not only did this save space on the cartridge, but it facilitates jersey swaps whenever a trade is made. To that point, I’ve made jersey swaps in NBA Live 95 for the Super Nintendo to represent several notable future stints. Let’s take a look back…way back…
Jersey Swaps With Correct Numbers
Although we can represent a number of future stints with jersey swaps in NBA Live 95 SNES, not all of them are completely accurate portrayals. Specifically, some of them won’t be displaying the new numbers that players sported when they changed teams. With that being said, quite a few players whose future stints can be portrayed with jersey swaps in NBA Live 95 SNES did manage to keep the same numbers when they moved on. These screenshots spotlight those examples. Granted, some of the jersey colours and designs aren’t entirely accurate as the teams in question adopted new branding in the years following the 1994 season, but you still get the basic idea!
We can represent some iconic stints that would begin in the near future with these jersey swaps. Alonzo Mourning and Glen Rice can trade places as they would as the 1996 season was getting underway. Chris Webber can be placed on either the Bullets or Kings. Dikembe Mutombo can be sent to the Hawks, where he spent the latter half of the 90s. Clyde Drexler can be placed in Houston, where he was a huge factor in the Rockets going back-to-back. Short-lived but memorable stints such as Isaiah Rider and Kenny Anderson forming a backcourt in Portland can also be represented. As he’s #32 here, Shaquille O’Neal can accurately sport a Heat uniform in these jersey swaps.
Since he kept #45 throughout his career, A.C. Green’s future stints with the Lakers, Heat, and Mavericks can be portrayed. Likewise, Tim Hardaway’s Miami tenure can be represented, but so can his stranger stints with the Nuggets and Mavericks. Indeed, several examples of familiar faces in strange places are possible via jersey swaps in NBA Live 95, including Scottie Pippen in Houston, Dominique Wilkins in Orlando, Patrick Ewing in Seattle, Gary Payton in Milwaukee, and Alonzo Mourning in New Jersey. Both these iconic and weird future stints were unthinkable in 1994, but it just goes to show that there’s no guarantee stars will end their careers where they began.
Jersey Swaps With Incorrect Numbers
There are also several future stints that we can portray with jersey swaps in which players are sporting the wrong numbers during introductions and on the court. This includes Dennis Rodman’s tenure with the Bulls, where he switched from the more conventional #10 to his now-infamous #91. Similarly, with Chicago retiring #4 in honour of Jerry Sloan, Ron Harper had to switch to #9; a change that obviously can’t be reflected in NBA Live 95 SNES. Speaking of players who wore #4 – my favourite number, incidentally – while Shawn Kemp’s #40 remains accurate in a depiction of his future stints with the Blazers and Magic, his Cavs jersey swap isn’t a spot-on switch.
As far as the most iconic future stint that we can portray with a jersey swap – albeit with an incorrect number – that has to be Shaq on the Lakers. Placing him there with #32 reminded me of trying to accurately update NBA Live 96 PC before I discovered the NLSC and all of its modding tools in 1997! To a lesser extent, Steve Smith’s #3 also sticks out like a sore thumb. Smitty went on to wear #8 in all of his future stints, including his return to the Heat at the end of his career. Elsewhere, Charles Oakley’s #34 is perfect for his brief return stint with the Bulls in 2002, but doesn’t match his short Rockets run in which he wore #33, due to #34 belonging to Hakeem Olajuwon.
Shawn Bradley’s #76 – a gimmicky number with the 76ers to be sure – doesn’t fit his future stints with the Nets and Mavericks. Hersey Hawkins only wore #32 for a year, but it was 1994, so that’s what he has in NBA Live 95 for SNES. He later wore #33 in Seattle and #3 in Chicago; as an aside, Hawkins was jarringly given Pippen’s #33 in the default rosters of NBA Live 2000! Dominique Wilkins had to reverse his famous #21 to #12 when he went to the Celtics for the 1995 season, as it had been retired in honour of Bill Sharman. Although a couple of Tom Gugliotta’s future stints can be accurately portrayed with jersey swaps, he wore #8 during his brief Warriors tenure.
The Fun of Jersey Swaps & Other Retro Roster Customisation
There are even more future stints that can be represented with jersey swaps in NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo. I’ve simply chosen to show some of the most noteworthy, but I did end up taking over 300 screenshots when I was preparing this feature! To that end, some people may find this an incredibly strange activity, and wonder why I’d even attempt it. The simple answer is that it’s really fun for me! I love NBA history and the interactive almanac aspect of classic basketball video games, and I always enjoy combining the two with Wayback Wednesday features. However, I also enjoy the challenge of customising the rosters in games to depict other historical scenarios.
NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo presents an even greater challenge because roster editing is limited to Season mode and swapping the starters. I had to choose a team and then simulate through its schedule, moving players around every few games in order to set up all the future stints and the necessary jersey swaps. As I’m sure you can guess from all the times their home court shows up in the screenshots, I picked the Miami Heat for this exercise. They had some of the most notable jersey swaps, such as Shaq, Mourning, Tim Hardaway, and The Glove. I did try to mix things up with some screenshots from road games, though home jersey swaps aren’t as exciting!
Additionally, roster customisation challenges in NBA Live 95 SNES always make me appreciate the functionality in later games. It’s easy to grumble that a title is missing the ability to do this or that – and those are still valid criticisms – but even as soon as the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 96, there was so much more that we could do! NBA Live 95 SNES is also an extremely nostalgic title to me, and I remember thinking how cool it was when I saw the jersey swaps after making trades in Season mode. It was a nifty little workaround when there was such limited storage space, though big changes weren’t far off. As these jersey swaps demonstrate, that was true for the NBA, too.
The post Wayback Wednesday: Jersey Swaps for Future Stints in NBA Live 95 appeared first on NLSC.