Wayback Wednesday: Miner Inaccuracies in NBA Jam TE PC

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 a handful of minor inaccuracies – some of which involve Harold Miner – in NBA Jam TE for PC.

The PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is one of my all-time favourite basketball video games. It’s actually the first basketball video game that I owned, and I still have my original copy thirty years later. To that end, along with trading cards, it played a part in teaching me about NBA teams and players during the early days of my basketball fandom. Of course, being an arcade title that took liberties with ratings and indeed the importance of certain players, it wasn’t the most accurate introduction across the board!

Obviously I had other, more accurate resources as well, from magazines and books to watching every game and episode of NBA Action that I could. It soon allowed me to identify the inaccuracies in NBA Jam TE PC, though it didn’t diminish my love of the game. In fact, as the years have gone by and I’ve also learned more about video game development, it’s been fascinating to dust off the game and analyse those inaccuracies; especially the ones that appear to be intentional design choices. There are a few that I’d like to discuss today, so let’s take a look back…way back…

We’ll begin with Harold Miner, whose inaccuracies nicely set up a Miner/minor pun for the title of this feature. First of all, there’s the fact that he’s one of the three players that’s immediately available on the Miami Heat, and the default second player to boot. This was definitely overestimating his importance to the team in 1995! Miner’s third year in the league was his worst to that point. He only played in 45 games, shooting the ball poorly and scoring a paltry 7.3 ppg after averaging 10.4 ppg over his first two seasons. To be blunt, there’s no way that he was the second-most important player on the Heat that year. Even ranking him top five in importance would really be a stretch.

At the same time, as a two-time and reigning Slam Dunk Champion, Harold Miner was a recognisable name. It made more sense to feature him in a game that was all about dunking than, say, Bimbo Coles. He was a more exciting player than Billy Owens, who was available after beating all 27 teams to unlock the expanded rosters. The Heat’s other unlockable player – Khalid Reeves – appears on the Rookies team by default. Basically, Miner is the best and most logical choice, given the tone and style of NBA Jam TE. Boosting his profile also meant inflating his ratings though, and to that point, his passing, stealing, blocking, and clutch abilities are wildly overrated.

However, perhaps the most interesting inaccuracy with Harold Miner in NBA Jam TE for PC is that technically, he shouldn’t be on the Miami Heat at all! He spent the entire regular season with them, but was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the postseason; June 14th to be exact, the same day the NBA Finals ended. This is significant because NBA Jam TE PC does account for other trades that were made during the Playoffs or on Draft day. As I noted when I broke down the game’s timeline, it features elements from the 1994, 1995, and upcoming 1996 seasons. If we look at a list of 1995 season transactions though, we can pinpoint the rosters as being accurate as of June 27th.

Well, mostly accurate, anyway. Miner is still with his old team, and he’s not the only one. The late Oliver Miller is the third player in the Detroit Pistons’ default trio, but he too had moved on by that point. In Miller’s case, the Toronto Raptors had plucked him from the Pistons in the Expansion Draft, which had taken place on June 24th. Other teams’ rosters were altered as the result of the Expansion Draft, but admittedly that would’ve been difficult with the Pistons. Their two extra players were Grant Hill and Bill Curley, who like Khalid Reeves were on the Rookies team before the expanded rosters were unlocked. Removing Miller would’ve left the Pistons with two players.

Mind you, this wouldn’t have been a problem if they’d kept Lindsey Hunter from the arcade version. Even if they ignored the fact that Miller was no longer with the team, he’d have been a better unlockable player than Bill Curley! In any event, that choice meant that Miller had to stay. While we’re on the subject of Oliver Miller and his inaccuracies in NBA Jam TE PC, he has identical ratings to Terry Mills. Some of the ratings fit Miller better while others are more suited to Mills, so it’s a weird copy and paste error. I remember thinking that it was odd even before I knew more about both players, but it does make them the most balanced duo in the history of NBA Jam!

It would certainly appear that keeping Harold Miner in Miami and Oliver Miller in Detroit was a deliberate decision to forego accuracy in the name of roster viability. Oversight is a possibility, but again, other postseason moves were accounted for. B.J. Armstrong – also taken by the Raptors in the Expansion Draft – was replaced on the Bulls by Ron Harper, who had appeared on the Clippers in the original arcade version. This in turn led to a couple of inaccuracies for Harper, such as an unrealistically high three-point rating so that he could fill Armstrong’s role as Chicago’s sharpshooter. He also erroneously replaced Armstrong on the All-Stars squad in the expanded rosters.

Gerald Wilkins was also removed from NBA Jam TE PC after he was taken by the Vancouver Grizzlies in the Expansion Draft. He’d been the third player in the Cavs’ trio in the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis versions, with John “Hot Rod” Williams as the unlockable fourth player. With Wilkins’ removal, Williams became the third player behind Mark Price and Brad Daugherty, and the Cavs – like the Atlanta Hawks – simply didn’t have any extra players to unlock. Ironically, Harold Miner could’ve been their fourth player in light of the trade, while Billy Owens took his place on the Heat. It likely would’ve felt like a mistake though, so I’d say they made the right call.

Before we move on, it should be noted that Daugherty and Wilkins being playable in the home ports was arguably also an inaccuracy. Both missed the entire 1995 season, with Daugherty’s career basically coming to an end in 1994. It would’ve been more accurate to pair Price up with Hot Rod as the default duo – if not Tyrone Hill or even Terrell Brandon – with Daugherty and Wilkins as the unlockables. Then again, they’d both been important players for the Cavs, so it made sense to include them. A similar decision was made with NBA Live 95 PC, where they’re available on the Cavaliers’ bench despite being inactive all season. It was preferable that they remained playable.

Once again, it suggests that some inaccuracies – including Harold Miner and Oliver Miller remaining with their old teams – were deliberate design choices to keep the rosters balanced and interesting with recognisable names. Of course, while Miner’s boosted ratings are in line with presenting him as a more important player, Miller and Mills sharing the same ratings doesn’t make sense. Like Kevin Edwards having Blue Edwards’ face and portrait, and Dennis Rodman reverting to a portrait with black hair – errors found in the SNES prototype, incidentally – Miller and Mills’ ratings are most likely an oversight. It’d make sense for them to be fudged, but not totally identical.

That brings us to an entertaining exercise with the ratings in NBA Jam TE PC: trying to pick which ones are intentionally inaccurate for the sake of balance and fun, which are oversights or errors due to unfamiliarity, and which may be a case of the dev team being a little biased! As far as intentional errors are concerned, three-point ratings for big men like Patrick Ewing were slightly juiced to avoid situations where a duo would have no chance of hitting from downtown. Since there’s no rebounding rating, Dennis Rodman has high blocking and stealing to ensure that he’s a defensive menace. Danny Manning’s ratings kind of make him feel like a nerfed stand-in for Charles Barkley.

And then, there are the ratings that are tougher to explain and rationalise. As a few people pointed out when I Photoshopped a tribute to the 1990 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels using NBA Jam TE and College Slam for SNES, Christian Laettner’s passing rating of zero is downright insulting. For that matter, he’s rather underrated as a whole. Dino Radja and Juwan Howard have three-point ratings of nine; Radja didn’t make a single three in his NBA career, while Howard was 6-for-50 from downtown by the time he retired. Scott Skiles has a passing rating of seven, while Toni Kukoc’s is nine. Pooh Richardson has ridiculously good ratings, and was also added to the All-Stars squad.

It’s possible that Pooh’s ratings were boosted so that the Clippers have a star player in their default trio. Compared to the original NBA Jam, Tournament Edition did do a better job of making sure that even the lottery-bound, basement-dwelling teams were fun and viable to play with. A couple of those ratings may have been intentionally inaccurate just to spice up gameplay and get people talking. However, I do suspect that oversight, a lack of research, and bias came into play. I get the feeling that Kukoc having a Clutch rating of nine while Scottie Pippen’s is only five was a reference to The Croatian Sensation’s Playoff heroics as Pip opted to sulk on the Bulls’ bench.

On one hand, you still want ratings in an arcade game to reflect the general abilities and play style of all the players, albeit boosted for effect and balance. In all fairness, a majority of the ratings in NBA Jam TE PC do just that, at least for the most part. On the other hand, because arcade games are taking a much less serious approach in their representation of basketball, there’s room for exaggeration, fantasy, and narratives in determining ratings. After all, the original NBA Jam was rigged against the Bulls in crunch time when they were facing the Pistons. Secrets like that, as well as fun breaks from the realism we’d expect in sim titles, are all part of the charm of arcade games.

Nevertheless, to reiterate a point that Dee has made on the NLSC Podcast, it’s fun and fascinating to look back at games and try to figure out what the developers’ thought process was. Quite often that’s an exercise when revisiting terrible games with truly bizarre design choices, but it also applies to the classics that have interesting quirks and notable inaccuracies. In lieu of being able to ask any of the developers directly – and after all this time, they may not remember anyway – we can make reasonable assumptions about why they chose not to include specific 1995 postseason moves. Of course, if they were oversights, then those mistakes were actually quite serendipitous.

I’m confident that when it comes to Harold Miner and Oliver Miller though, those were deliberate decisions. Given the circumstances, it makes too much sense to forego those moves while swapping Hersey Hawkins and Kendall Gill, removing Gerald Wilkins from Cleveland, and replacing B.J. Armstrong with Ron Harper. Still, the result is an interesting and not entirely accurate snapshot of the NBA just prior to the lockout of 1995. It’s funny to think that it was one of my earliest resources to learn about players beyond the biggest stars, and who they played for. No doubt it’s why I remember Otis Thorpe’s Portland Trail Blazers stint, despite it lasting only 34 games!

Needless to say, I have a ton of nostalgia for the PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition. How could I not, with it being the first basketball video game that I owned? Both it and the original NBA Jam remain a blast to play today, holding up better than their generational contemporaries in the sim genre. On top of that though, it’s been a joy to revisit it with greater knowledge of the NBA and video game development, and examine the inaccuracies, intriguing design choices, and other aspects of its rosters. It’s why I enjoy revisiting the old favourites. You might just discover some interesting trivia, or finally get an answer to a question that’s been on your mind for decades.

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