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 weird roster glitches that I’ve encountered in basketball video games over the years.

The harsh reality of video game design is that no release is ever going to be absolutely perfect. Of course, absolute perfection is an impossible goal in just about any creative endeavour, and you’ll also never be able to please everyone with your design choices. On top of that, bugs are basically inevitable. They were present in classic games, and we certainly see them in modern titles. Whether it’s Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or NBA 2K26, it’s just not feasible to code a game that has absolutely no technical issues or imperfections.

Ideally, bugs and glitches will be rare, or have minimal impact on the experience. The best video games – basketball or otherwise – tend to be extremely stable for the most part. There have been some frustrating bugs in basketball video games over the years though, including glitches related to roster editing. They can be particularly nasty, causing us to lose saved data and in turn countless hours of work customising a game. As someone who has enjoyed tinkering with games and creating roster mods since the 90s, I’ve encountered several weird glitches and badly-designed editing functions. These five are among the strangest and most annoying that I’ve experienced to date.

1. A League of Christian Laettners

This glitch was so weird that I had to make an entire video about it for Wayback Wednesday! Upon firing up my copy of NBA Live 97 for Super Nintendo many years back, I discovered that half the league was now comprised of clones of Christian Laettner. Naturally I tried resetting the rosters, suspecting that the data had somehow become corrupted. However, even after resetting the rosters and the entire console – multiple times – I was still stuck with a league full of Laettners. At one point, the issue became less severe, with only a few clones of Laettner here and there. Trying to trade players created more duplicates though, and eventually the Laettner clones returned.

As I mentioned in the video, my guess is that there’s an issue with the battery, since it shouldn’t be possible to overwrite the original data. A comment from someone who has experienced similar weird roster glitches in the Sega Mega Drive version seems to confirm that theory. As for why it’s Christian Laettner being duplicated over and over again, presumably it’s due to him being the starting power forward for the Atlanta Hawks, and thus the first player listed on the first team that appears in NBA Live 97’s roster screen. I ended up buying a second copy of NBA Live 97 SNES and so far it’s working fine, though if the issue is battery-related, it’s probably only a matter of time.

2. Duplicate Players in NBA Live 06 (Xbox 360)

Playing Sierra’s adventure games in the 90s taught me to save early and often, else risk losing all of my progress. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that I’ve still ignored from time to time. This also applies to modding, as neglecting to save frequently had led to me losing a ton of work on various roster projects. The most recent example came during my retro kick with NBA Live 06 for Xbox 360. As is often the case, I began tinkering with the rosters and began assembling some makeshift retro teams. I wasn’t too concerned about losing my work thanks to the auto-save functionality, but to that point, I didn’t keep staggered saves of stable rosters that I could revert to if need be.

And so, when I discovered that a nasty bug had caused a glitch that had been saved along with the rest of my changes, hours of work went down the drain. If you change a player’s team on the Edit Player screen, it messes up the rosters with duplicates that are invisible during gameplay. Considering that there’s no need for that function in Edit Player and it’s really easy to accidentally change a player’s team while navigating that screen, it’s an extremely frustrating glitch! I wish I’d been paying more attention and kept staggered backups to restore from, but the silver lining is that it encouraged me to go back to creating roster projects for the PC version of NBA Live 06 instead.

3. Weird Roster Editing in NBA Full Court Press

Technically speaking, this is more of a design flaw than a glitch, but when a staple function is so bad that it acts like a bug, I think that it counts! Microsoft’s NBA Full Court Press had a few advantages over NBA Live 97 PC, from the inclusion of a steal button to Kevin Calabro’s commentary to authentic details such as full and 20-second timeouts. However, these nifty touches are overshadowed by the mediocre gameplay, final 1996 season rosters, and other problems. At least the outdated rosters were fixed via patches, but there was no getting around the fact that several basic functions and features were either completely missing or didn’t work nearly as well as they should.

That includes some of the clunkiest roster editing that you’ll find in a sim title. Not only are the functions spread out across different menus requiring way too much back and forth, but it’s ridiculously easy to mess up the rosters. There’s a copy function that can ostensibly be used to modify the All-Star teams, but the catch here is that it also replaces the original player on their NBA team. To that end, moving players around and reordering the lineups – something that’s a breeze in NBA Live 97 – is close to impossible without ruining the roster. Again, it’s technically a design flaw, but the undesirable results of such poor roster customisation functionality feel like glitches.

4. Custom Roster Crashes in Dynasty Mode

NBA Live 2005 is a superb game, but as I said, no release is perfect. A patch fixed some of the major issues in the PC version, but there are a couple of bugs that weren’t addressed. Although NBA Live 2005 is generally a modder-friendly game, you may occasionally encounter crashes in Dynasty mode when you’re using a custom roster. Fortunately, there is a quick and easy fix here. All you need to do is reload that roster before loading into your Dynasty save, and everything should be fine. It shouldn’t be necessary and the issue hasn’t appeared in any other NBA Live games from around that time, but at the end of the day, it’s a fairly painless solution to avoid the crashes.

What’s weird is that we haven’t been able to determine any mistakes or glitches that would cause a custom roster to crash the game. Obviously the more external editing we perform, the more likely it is that we change something that causes instability and subsequently crashes, but it also seems to happen with rosters mods that don’t include anything out of the ordinary. If I end up doing some more work on NBA Live 2005, I’ll look into the issue again and see if I can figure anything out. It is one of the very few issues when it comes to modding NBA Live 2005 PC however, and since there is a simple workaround, the crashes haven’t stood in the way of us using custom rosters.

5. Primacy Rating Recalculations

Once again, no game is perfect. As such, even though NBA Live 06 PC is my all-time favourite basketball game – and the last great all-around release in the series in my opinion – I do have my quibbles with it. In particular, Primary recalculation can really be annoying, especially in Dynasty mode. For those who are unaware, Primacy is a hidden attribute in NBA Live 06 that determines which players take the most shots during gameplay, and how much they score in simulated games. The catch is that when there’s a trade or a player is injured, the game automatically recalculates the Primacy ratings for everyone on the team to ensure that there’s still a Go-To scorer.

It’s a logical failsafe, but it doesn’t work as well as one would hope. The adjusted Primacy ratings aren’t necessarily logical, resulting in the wrong players taking the most shots and scoring the most points. Moreover, in the case of injuries, the game doesn’t restore the original attributes upon a player’s recovery. This meant that a mild injury that very briefly sidelined a top scorer can end up derailing their career. It’s why I came to include batch files that manually fixed Primacy ratings with my current roster updates. Like the aforementioned issue in NBA Full Court Press, this is more of a flawed mechanic than a bug, though it ultimately has a similar impact to a glitch.

Have you ever encountered these issues? What are some other weird roster glitches that you can recall? Have your say 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 Weird Roster Glitches appeared first on NLSC.