Apr 13, 2020
Ranking the original NBA Jam duos
The original NBA Jam released in arcades in 1993 featured only two players on each of the league's teams. Some of them could dunk. Some of them could hit from deep. Some of them were Mike Iuzzolino. And now the definitive ranking of the 27 duos.
, TSN.ca Staff
Is NBA Jam the greatest sports video game of all-time?
Who’s to say? Me. And the answer is yes. Yes, it is.
For arcades, 1993 was a halcyon year. After the earthshattering popularity of the original, Mortal Kombat II was released. The sequel improved on the original in almost every way with smoother controls, better graphics and a larger roster of fighters with the debuts of Baraka, Jax and Kung Lao. You could even play as Shang Tsung in this one. And he wasn’t a weird old man anymore. He was young and he had a jaunty little hat for some reason. Frankly, the transition was jarring.
If Mortal Kombat II didn’t float your boat, there was Virtua Fighter, Sega’s first entry into the fighting game genre. While Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat offered 2D fighting, Virtua Fighter went full 3D. It was the first-ever fighting game in 3D and it looked like nothing you’d ever seen before. In retrospect, the game looked like trash. Those early blocky 3D games have not aged well. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are all-time classics, but have you played them recently? Everything is just a mass of blocky polygons devoid of any aesthetic grace. Obviously, that was due to the limitations of hardware at the time, but the 32- and 64-bit era of games just don’t evoke the whimsy or nostalgia of their earlier 8- and 16-bit generation counterparts and instead make you conclude that if 64-bit Link ever showed up at your house party, you’d warn anybody around him not to get too close or risk losing an eye on one of his many sharp corners. Maybe just put a couple of oven mitts on his shoulders to be safe.
But what got me into the arcade in 1993 was NBA Jam, Midway’s masterpiece. There were a ton of other sports games in arcades before NBA Jam. You could get your fill of racing games from Daytona USA to Ridge Racer. WWF WrestleFest featured a pretty robust roster for the time and who didn’t want to play as Earthquake or the Big Boss Man? Neo Geo released a number of Baseball Stars games in the early ‘90s and those were actually a lot of fun, but none of those games were NBA Jam.
I remember being 11 years old and at the food court in Sherway Gardens. In the back corner, there was an arcade for some reason. I guess the logic was that you could dump your kids off to play Revolution X for 20 minutes while you ate your J. Kwinter hot dog or Druxy’s sandwich in peace. Anyway, I wandered off to the arcade while my parents were dining on something and there it was – this two-on-two basketball game where people were capable of hitting ridiculous somersaulting dunks or insane threes from half-court. These men were spitting in the face of the laws of physics. If you hit three shots in a row, your ball would literally catch fire. The announcer was great. Wait, did he just say “Boomshakalaka”? Holy hell, you could even shatter the backboard. And it had an NBA license! Midway’s prior title Arch Rivals, also a two-on-two basketball game released a couple of years earlier, was fun, but this was perfection.
I was in love. In that machine, I lost more quarters than a Gus Bradley-coached football team. While I had my favourite players and teams to play as them, I played it enough that I was able to experiment with multiple teams to find the best combination.
There were no perfect duos. This was arcade basketball, but the players roughly kept the same skill sets as their real-life counterparts – just exaggerated. Some players hit from deep better than others. Some players were better defenders. Some could dunk from longer range. Some – like Shaquille O’Neal – didn’t even have to jump to be able to dunk.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak shutting down virtually every avenue of sport, I feel like now is as good a time as any to share my findings. But before I do that, remember a couple of things: This is based on the original arcade rosters with only 54 players. Those teams had just two players each. Only in the home console editions were additional players added, giving you a choice of which two players to use. These rankings will not include any players obtained by using special codes. You’re not going to see Bill Clinton, Al Gore or the Beastie Boys here (RIP MCA, today and always). Also, if I just hated any particular team or player for whatever reason, that also affects their ratings.
Without further ado, the definitive NBA Jam rankings:
27. Milwaukee Bucks – Blue Edwards and Brad Lohaus – No, you’re reading this correctly – Brad Lohaus was one of the 54 players in NBA Jam. Maybe he was a friend of one of the developers? I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that while Brad Lohaus appeared in 656 games over 11 seasons, his inclusion in this game was a puzzling one. The 1992-93 Bucks were not a good team. They won 28 games. I’ll give you that it might have been difficult to pick two players from a moribund club, but Moses Malone was on that team. Yes, he was 37 and a shell of the player who was a 12-time All-Star and three-time MVP, but he was still Moses Malone. Brad Lohaus was a career 5.9 PPG player. What the hell, man? Brad Lohaus.
26. Los Angeles Clippers – Ron Harper and Danny Manning – Look, Ron Harper and Danny Manning were fine players. Manning was a first overall pick and made a couple of All-Star teams and Harper won five NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, but nobody wanted to play as the Clippers in 1993. You know when you go to a restaurant and you order a Coke and then the server in a pained smile asks, “Is Pepsi okay?” because it’s a Pepsi establishment and not a Coke one? The Lakers were both Coke and Pepsi. The Clippers were RC Cola. No, thank you.
25. Boston Celtics – Kevin McHale and Reggie Lewis – The post-Larry Bird Celtics stunk for a long time. The Kevin McHale that was in this game was not the All-Star Kevin McHale. Dee Brown was on that team and he would have been a lot more fun. On a macabre note, Reggie Lewis was one of two players in this game who would die within a year of its release.
24. Washington Bullets – Tom Gugliotta and Harvey Grant – Every team needed two guys and Tom Gugliotta and Harvey Grant certainly fitted that bill.
23. Minnesota Timberwolves – Chuck Person and Christian Laettner – Brad Lohaus aside, you could certainly argue for this team to be dead last because of Christian Laettner – not from an in-game play perspective, mind you, but just on a what kind of Patrick Bateman-level psychopath would wanna play as him level?
22. Dallas Mavericks – Derek Harper and Mike Iuzzolino – Like I said, everybody needed two players. The Mavs are ranked here because of the sheer audacity of the developers’ inclusion of Mike Iuzzolino in this game. You can’t even be mad at this the way you would be about Brad Lohaus being here because you knew who Brad Lohaus was and he didn’t belong. You didn’t know who Mike Iuzzolino was because who’s Mike Iuzzolino? No, really. Who is this guy? Mike Iuzzolino’s claim to fame is being in NBA Jam. This was like when the WWF sent The Big Show to its developmental territory to lose weight in 2001, forcing the developers to replace him in WWF No Mercy with Stevie Richards. It made so little sense that you couldn’t possibly be angry.
21. Denver Nuggets – Dikembe Mutombo and LaPhonso Ellis – Dikembe Mutombo is a Hall of Famer and everybody loved the finger wag, but come on. Nobody wants to play as a defence-first player in NBA Jam. You didn’t go to the arcade to experience the thrill of blocking somebody or posting up for a jump hook.
20. Cleveland Cavaliers – Mark Price and Brad Daugherty – This was actually a pretty effective duo. Price could hit from three and Daugherty could dunk and that’s what you really wanted in the team you picked. But they were on the sad-sack Cavs and you weren’t about to play as them...especially if people were watching you. In years when we look back at LeBron James’s career long after he’s retired, never forget that he made it okay to wear Cavs merch.
19. Philadelphia 76ers – Jeff Hornacek and Hersey Hawkins – This game came out the same year that Charles Barkley went to Phoenix, so the developers went with Hawkins and Hornacek, a fine, but unsexy – just completely devoid of sexiness – duo. But you know who else was on this Sixers team? Manute Bol. Bol was 7-foot-6 and, for that reason, he would have been one of the guys who could dunk without jumping and I always liked that. The next year, Shawn Bradley would be one of the Sixers players available in NBA Jam and he could dunk without jumping, but he was still Shawn Bradley and you weren’t about to play as him. Ugh, he was in Space Jam, too.
18. Miami Heat – Glen Rice and Rony Seikaly – Glen Rice was a lot of fun in this game, but I still question the selection of Rony Seikaly. Seikaly was a very good big man and he had a long and productive career, but that Heat team also had Steve Smith and Harold “Baby Jordan” Miner. This is a game where you wanna do cool dunks and Harold Miner isn’t in it, so this was a grievous oversight.
17. Sacramento Kings – Spud Webb and Wayman Tisdale – The Sacramento Kings will forever be in the pantheon of just there teams alongside the Colorado Rockies, Arizona Coyotes and Los Angeles Chargers as teams that are just there and don’t elicit any kind of response other than “Yes, they are a team.” They’re just there. So why wouldn’t the Kings be at the bottom of these rankings? Spud Webb. Spud Webb owned. Spud Webb was 5-foot-7 and he could dunk. The existence of Spud Webb made you disdain any player under 6-foot-4 who couldn’t or wouldn’t dunk. Do it, you cowards. Dunk the damn ball.
16. Los Angeles Lakers – James Worthy and Vlade Divac – The Lakers are only this high because of legacy. These Lakers teams were the dregs of Showtime in the post-Magic, pre-Shaq and Kobe days, so you got James Worthy and Vlade Divac. Eh, they’re fine.
15. Chicago Bulls – Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant – We’ve now reached the part of the rankings where virtually every team is good and you can make very good arguments for picking any of the remaining 15 squads. Are the Bulls really the 15th-best team here? Probably not. They probably deserve to be put higher, but this rating is based on pure spite. As you’re probably aware, Michael Jordan wasn’t in NBA Jam (Shaq and Barkley pulled themselves out of subsequent console release, but this is about MJ). Ever the savviest of businessmen, Jordan retained his likeness rights outside of the NBA’s CBA and made sure he wasn’t in the game. So because this was a Chicago Bulls team in 1993 that didn’t have Michael Jordan, I can’t in good conscience rank it any higher than this.
14. Detroit Pistons – Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer – When the best player on your team is a point guard of small stature, chances are NBA Jam wouldn’t be a lot of fun when playing as them (Spud Webb being the exception). Zeke is a Hall of Famer, but you could have a better time by playing with other teams. Laimbeer’s inclusion over Joe Dumars is one of the more egregious errors in judgment made by the developers. Why would you want to play as Bill Laimbeer if you couldn’t benefit from playing dirty, one of his greatest assets? You could, of course, play very dirty in Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, a game in which you played basketball as a robot in 2031 and could literally blow up players on the other team. That title was part of a brief trend of robot sports games that also included the NES classic Base Wars, a robo-baseball game in which attempting to steal second led to a fight to the death.
13. Charlotte Hornets – Larry Johnson and Kendall Gill – Again, most of the teams left are very good and you really couldn’t go wrong, but there’s good logic in ranking these Hornets where they are. Kendall Gill is not Alonzo Mourning. You could play as Zo in the home console version and the LJ/Zo duo was one of the very best in the game. The third Hornets player was Muggsy Bogues, a player in the fun little guy category, so Charlotte was a team to play as at home and not at the arcade. No disrespect to Kendall Gill intended.
12. San Antonio Spurs – David Robinson and Sean Elliott – Technically, one of the better duos in the game and a fine choice, but The Admiral didn’t have an ounce of disrespect to his game. He was a pro’s pro. He played the game with honour. Robinson was a Navy man, for God’s sake. So when you’d windmill dunk from the foul line with him, you knew his heart wasn’t in it because the real David Robinson would never show anybody up like that. If you listen carefully enough, you can probably hear that arcade version of Robinson quietly apologizing to his opponents. He didn’t want to be doing that. He didn't mean to knock you flying halfway across the court. It was the person playing the game who made him.
11. New Jersey Nets – Derrick Coleman and Drazen Petrovic – As mentioned above with Reggie Lewis, Petrovic was the other player who tragically died within a year of this game’s release. Derrick Coleman was fun as hell. I’m pretty sure I still have his NBA Hoops rookie card somewhere. He’s wearing his brown draft day suit and he’s not even looking at the camera. I don’t know how many pictures of Derrick Coleman were taken at the 1990 NBA Draft, but I’m sure there were at least a couple where he was looking at the camera. NBA Hoops chose one where he was not. Good stuff.
10. Houston Rockets – Hakeem Olajuwon and Kenny Smith – In most cases, the ideal NBA Jam combo had a big and a guard and The Dream and The Jet worked. But, I dunno, I found Hakeem completely unappealing in this game for the same reason that David Robinson was. Hakeem Olajuwon was above this nonsense. There was no joy in playing as the Rockets. I’m sorry.
9. Portland Trail Blazers – Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter – What’s remarkable about the Blazers duo is that both Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter have that same thing that Arn Anderson does where no matter what age they are, they appear to be 47 years old. In 1993, Drexler and Porter were only 30 and 29, respectively, but go back and look at them. They looked like they’d rather be watching a war movie or listening to Bob Seger than playing basketball.
8. Orlando Magic – Shaquille O’Neal and Scott Skiles – Imagine being the poor guy who thought “I won’t play NBA Jam at the arcade – I’ll just wait until it comes out for Super Nintendo,” waited, fired it up on the SNES and picked the Magic. Wait a minute. Nick Anderson? Is that my science teacher? (No, that’s Scott Skiles, but I can see why you thought that.) Where is Shaq? My friend, Shaquille O’Neal was not there. Shaquille O’Neal watched over his likeness much like MJ did, so he was able to pull himself out of the home release of NBA Jam. In order to harness the ferocity of a young Shaq in the paint, you had to be at the arcade. If you wanted to play as Shaq at home, you had to wait until 1994 for Shaq Fu, a Mortal Kombat clone that was somehow worse than it sounds.
7. New York Knicks – Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley – The Knicks would offer a more balanced roster on the home consoles with the addition of John Starks, but the all-frontcourt duo of Ewing and Oakley was still one to be reckoned with in the arcade.
6. Golden State Warriors – Tim Hardaway and Chris Mullin – A duo like Chris Mullin and Tim Hardaway is what this game was made for. Don Nelson’s Dubs teams were all run-and-gun and you could try to replicate that as best you could at the arcade with those two.
5. Atlanta Hawks – Dominique Wilkins and Stacey Augmon – When you think of players who might be capable of doing NBA Jam-type dunks in real life, the one name at the top of that list was Dominique Wilkins. Sure, you could still play as ‘Nique in Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs and other basketball games available at that time, but you couldn’t make him reverse jam from the three-point arc like you could in NBA Jam...you know, like you were pretty sure he could do in reality, but only didn’t do that not to embarrass anybody else. Stacey Augmon was cool, too, so let’s not forget about him.
4. Phoenix Suns – Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle – Barkley was a weird one because he actually was in certain home console versions of the game, but not others released a little bit later. Why? Because he signed a deal with a company called Accolade to produce Barkley Shut Up and Jam!, a streetball game for the SNES and Genesis that was suspiciously similar to NBA Jam, but not nearly as good. I don’t know what they paid him, but he should have stuck with NBA Jam because the Barkley-Majerle combo was fun as hell. I’m sorry, Kevin Johnson, but you just couldn’t do what Sir Charles could.
3. Seattle SuperSonics – Shawn Kemp and Benoit Benjamin – Shawn Kemp was one of the greatest dunkers in NBA history, so naturally you’d think he would translate well to NBA Jam. But the difference between him and a guy like Dominique Wilkins is that, while Wilkins had style and ability for days, Kemp had malice and swagger to everything he did. He enjoyed posterizing his opponents. He reveled in it. With Wilkins, when you got dunked on, it was like “Well, what are you gonna do?” With the Reign Man, it was “Oh, no. Why me? I can no longer look my children in the eye.” Few players had an ethos that synced up as well as Kemp’s did with NBA Jam. He was tailor-made for it.
2. Utah Jazz – Karl Malone and John Stockton – They were a Hall of Fame duo on the court and they were as good as they come in NBA Jam. Stockton and the Mailman had it all – smothering defence, the ability to hit from deep and Malone could dunk with the best of them. For some – like Vernon Maxwell, you would have to assume – it meant getting past their terrible uniforms (that have since aged well in retrospect) to pick the Jazz, but if you wanted to rule whatever arcade you were in, Utah was a safe and smart choice.
1. Indiana Pacers – Reggie Miller and Detlef Schrempf – I never pretended this list was anything more than my own personal preference, but I have a very good reason for putting the Pacers where they are. The name of the game in NBA Jam was about finding balance in your duo, but in Reggie Miller alone, you had that in a single player. If you picked, let’s say, John Stockton or Mark Price, you were sacrificing the ability to dunk for hitting from three consistently. If you went with Larry Johnson, you got all the dunking you wanted – and to be fair, that’s probably all you wanted – but none of the deep balls. Now, ideally the other member of your duo carried that other end of the game that one didn’t, but with Reggie, you didn’t need anybody else. Miller could produce the highlight-reel slams and have deadly aim from three. There was nobody more well-rounded or fun to play with than Reggie Miller. Also, those mid-‘90s Pacers uniforms were dope as hell.
Who’s to say? Me. And the answer is yes. Yes, it is.
For arcades, 1993 was a halcyon year. After the earthshattering popularity of the original, Mortal Kombat II was released. The sequel improved on the original in almost every way with smoother controls, better graphics and a larger roster of fighters with the debuts of Baraka, Jax and Kung Lao. You could even play as Shang Tsung in this one. And he wasn’t a weird old man anymore. He was young and he had a jaunty little hat for some reason. Frankly, the transition was jarring.
If Mortal Kombat II didn’t float your boat, there was Virtua Fighter, Sega’s first entry into the fighting game genre. While Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat offered 2D fighting, Virtua Fighter went full 3D. It was the first-ever fighting game in 3D and it looked like nothing you’d ever seen before. In retrospect, the game looked like trash. Those early blocky 3D games have not aged well. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are all-time classics, but have you played them recently? Everything is just a mass of blocky polygons devoid of any aesthetic grace. Obviously, that was due to the limitations of hardware at the time, but the 32- and 64-bit era of games just don’t evoke the whimsy or nostalgia of their earlier 8- and 16-bit generation counterparts and instead make you conclude that if 64-bit Link ever showed up at your house party, you’d warn anybody around him not to get too close or risk losing an eye on one of his many sharp corners. Maybe just put a couple of oven mitts on his shoulders to be safe.
But what got me into the arcade in 1993 was NBA Jam, Midway’s masterpiece. There were a ton of other sports games in arcades before NBA Jam. You could get your fill of racing games from Daytona USA to Ridge Racer. WWF WrestleFest featured a pretty robust roster for the time and who didn’t want to play as Earthquake or the Big Boss Man? Neo Geo released a number of Baseball Stars games in the early ‘90s and those were actually a lot of fun, but none of those games were NBA Jam.
I remember being 11 years old and at the food court in Sherway Gardens. In the back corner, there was an arcade for some reason. I guess the logic was that you could dump your kids off to play Revolution X for 20 minutes while you ate your J. Kwinter hot dog or Druxy’s sandwich in peace. Anyway, I wandered off to the arcade while my parents were dining on something and there it was – this two-on-two basketball game where people were capable of hitting ridiculous somersaulting dunks or insane threes from half-court. These men were spitting in the face of the laws of physics. If you hit three shots in a row, your ball would literally catch fire. The announcer was great. Wait, did he just say “Boomshakalaka”? Holy hell, you could even shatter the backboard. And it had an NBA license! Midway’s prior title Arch Rivals, also a two-on-two basketball game released a couple of years earlier, was fun, but this was perfection.
I was in love. In that machine, I lost more quarters than a Gus Bradley-coached football team. While I had my favourite players and teams to play as them, I played it enough that I was able to experiment with multiple teams to find the best combination.
There were no perfect duos. This was arcade basketball, but the players roughly kept the same skill sets as their real-life counterparts – just exaggerated. Some players hit from deep better than others. Some players were better defenders. Some could dunk from longer range. Some – like Shaquille O’Neal – didn’t even have to jump to be able to dunk.
With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak shutting down virtually every avenue of sport, I feel like now is as good a time as any to share my findings. But before I do that, remember a couple of things: This is based on the original arcade rosters with only 54 players. Those teams had just two players each. Only in the home console editions were additional players added, giving you a choice of which two players to use. These rankings will not include any players obtained by using special codes. You’re not going to see Bill Clinton, Al Gore or the Beastie Boys here (RIP MCA, today and always). Also, if I just hated any particular team or player for whatever reason, that also affects their ratings.
Without further ado, the definitive NBA Jam rankings:
27. Milwaukee Bucks – Blue Edwards and Brad Lohaus – No, you’re reading this correctly – Brad Lohaus was one of the 54 players in NBA Jam. Maybe he was a friend of one of the developers? I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that while Brad Lohaus appeared in 656 games over 11 seasons, his inclusion in this game was a puzzling one. The 1992-93 Bucks were not a good team. They won 28 games. I’ll give you that it might have been difficult to pick two players from a moribund club, but Moses Malone was on that team. Yes, he was 37 and a shell of the player who was a 12-time All-Star and three-time MVP, but he was still Moses Malone. Brad Lohaus was a career 5.9 PPG player. What the hell, man? Brad Lohaus.
26. Los Angeles Clippers – Ron Harper and Danny Manning – Look, Ron Harper and Danny Manning were fine players. Manning was a first overall pick and made a couple of All-Star teams and Harper won five NBA titles with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, but nobody wanted to play as the Clippers in 1993. You know when you go to a restaurant and you order a Coke and then the server in a pained smile asks, “Is Pepsi okay?” because it’s a Pepsi establishment and not a Coke one? The Lakers were both Coke and Pepsi. The Clippers were RC Cola. No, thank you.
25. Boston Celtics – Kevin McHale and Reggie Lewis – The post-Larry Bird Celtics stunk for a long time. The Kevin McHale that was in this game was not the All-Star Kevin McHale. Dee Brown was on that team and he would have been a lot more fun. On a macabre note, Reggie Lewis was one of two players in this game who would die within a year of its release.
24. Washington Bullets – Tom Gugliotta and Harvey Grant – Every team needed two guys and Tom Gugliotta and Harvey Grant certainly fitted that bill.
23. Minnesota Timberwolves – Chuck Person and Christian Laettner – Brad Lohaus aside, you could certainly argue for this team to be dead last because of Christian Laettner – not from an in-game play perspective, mind you, but just on a what kind of Patrick Bateman-level psychopath would wanna play as him level?
22. Dallas Mavericks – Derek Harper and Mike Iuzzolino – Like I said, everybody needed two players. The Mavs are ranked here because of the sheer audacity of the developers’ inclusion of Mike Iuzzolino in this game. You can’t even be mad at this the way you would be about Brad Lohaus being here because you knew who Brad Lohaus was and he didn’t belong. You didn’t know who Mike Iuzzolino was because who’s Mike Iuzzolino? No, really. Who is this guy? Mike Iuzzolino’s claim to fame is being in NBA Jam. This was like when the WWF sent The Big Show to its developmental territory to lose weight in 2001, forcing the developers to replace him in WWF No Mercy with Stevie Richards. It made so little sense that you couldn’t possibly be angry.
21. Denver Nuggets – Dikembe Mutombo and LaPhonso Ellis – Dikembe Mutombo is a Hall of Famer and everybody loved the finger wag, but come on. Nobody wants to play as a defence-first player in NBA Jam. You didn’t go to the arcade to experience the thrill of blocking somebody or posting up for a jump hook.
20. Cleveland Cavaliers – Mark Price and Brad Daugherty – This was actually a pretty effective duo. Price could hit from three and Daugherty could dunk and that’s what you really wanted in the team you picked. But they were on the sad-sack Cavs and you weren’t about to play as them...especially if people were watching you. In years when we look back at LeBron James’s career long after he’s retired, never forget that he made it okay to wear Cavs merch.
19. Philadelphia 76ers – Jeff Hornacek and Hersey Hawkins – This game came out the same year that Charles Barkley went to Phoenix, so the developers went with Hawkins and Hornacek, a fine, but unsexy – just completely devoid of sexiness – duo. But you know who else was on this Sixers team? Manute Bol. Bol was 7-foot-6 and, for that reason, he would have been one of the guys who could dunk without jumping and I always liked that. The next year, Shawn Bradley would be one of the Sixers players available in NBA Jam and he could dunk without jumping, but he was still Shawn Bradley and you weren’t about to play as him. Ugh, he was in Space Jam, too.
18. Miami Heat – Glen Rice and Rony Seikaly – Glen Rice was a lot of fun in this game, but I still question the selection of Rony Seikaly. Seikaly was a very good big man and he had a long and productive career, but that Heat team also had Steve Smith and Harold “Baby Jordan” Miner. This is a game where you wanna do cool dunks and Harold Miner isn’t in it, so this was a grievous oversight.
17. Sacramento Kings – Spud Webb and Wayman Tisdale – The Sacramento Kings will forever be in the pantheon of just there teams alongside the Colorado Rockies, Arizona Coyotes and Los Angeles Chargers as teams that are just there and don’t elicit any kind of response other than “Yes, they are a team.” They’re just there. So why wouldn’t the Kings be at the bottom of these rankings? Spud Webb. Spud Webb owned. Spud Webb was 5-foot-7 and he could dunk. The existence of Spud Webb made you disdain any player under 6-foot-4 who couldn’t or wouldn’t dunk. Do it, you cowards. Dunk the damn ball.
16. Los Angeles Lakers – James Worthy and Vlade Divac – The Lakers are only this high because of legacy. These Lakers teams were the dregs of Showtime in the post-Magic, pre-Shaq and Kobe days, so you got James Worthy and Vlade Divac. Eh, they’re fine.
15. Chicago Bulls – Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant – We’ve now reached the part of the rankings where virtually every team is good and you can make very good arguments for picking any of the remaining 15 squads. Are the Bulls really the 15th-best team here? Probably not. They probably deserve to be put higher, but this rating is based on pure spite. As you’re probably aware, Michael Jordan wasn’t in NBA Jam (Shaq and Barkley pulled themselves out of subsequent console release, but this is about MJ). Ever the savviest of businessmen, Jordan retained his likeness rights outside of the NBA’s CBA and made sure he wasn’t in the game. So because this was a Chicago Bulls team in 1993 that didn’t have Michael Jordan, I can’t in good conscience rank it any higher than this.
14. Detroit Pistons – Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer – When the best player on your team is a point guard of small stature, chances are NBA Jam wouldn’t be a lot of fun when playing as them (Spud Webb being the exception). Zeke is a Hall of Famer, but you could have a better time by playing with other teams. Laimbeer’s inclusion over Joe Dumars is one of the more egregious errors in judgment made by the developers. Why would you want to play as Bill Laimbeer if you couldn’t benefit from playing dirty, one of his greatest assets? You could, of course, play very dirty in Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball, a game in which you played basketball as a robot in 2031 and could literally blow up players on the other team. That title was part of a brief trend of robot sports games that also included the NES classic Base Wars, a robo-baseball game in which attempting to steal second led to a fight to the death.
13. Charlotte Hornets – Larry Johnson and Kendall Gill – Again, most of the teams left are very good and you really couldn’t go wrong, but there’s good logic in ranking these Hornets where they are. Kendall Gill is not Alonzo Mourning. You could play as Zo in the home console version and the LJ/Zo duo was one of the very best in the game. The third Hornets player was Muggsy Bogues, a player in the fun little guy category, so Charlotte was a team to play as at home and not at the arcade. No disrespect to Kendall Gill intended.
12. San Antonio Spurs – David Robinson and Sean Elliott – Technically, one of the better duos in the game and a fine choice, but The Admiral didn’t have an ounce of disrespect to his game. He was a pro’s pro. He played the game with honour. Robinson was a Navy man, for God’s sake. So when you’d windmill dunk from the foul line with him, you knew his heart wasn’t in it because the real David Robinson would never show anybody up like that. If you listen carefully enough, you can probably hear that arcade version of Robinson quietly apologizing to his opponents. He didn’t want to be doing that. He didn't mean to knock you flying halfway across the court. It was the person playing the game who made him.
11. New Jersey Nets – Derrick Coleman and Drazen Petrovic – As mentioned above with Reggie Lewis, Petrovic was the other player who tragically died within a year of this game’s release. Derrick Coleman was fun as hell. I’m pretty sure I still have his NBA Hoops rookie card somewhere. He’s wearing his brown draft day suit and he’s not even looking at the camera. I don’t know how many pictures of Derrick Coleman were taken at the 1990 NBA Draft, but I’m sure there were at least a couple where he was looking at the camera. NBA Hoops chose one where he was not. Good stuff.
10. Houston Rockets – Hakeem Olajuwon and Kenny Smith – In most cases, the ideal NBA Jam combo had a big and a guard and The Dream and The Jet worked. But, I dunno, I found Hakeem completely unappealing in this game for the same reason that David Robinson was. Hakeem Olajuwon was above this nonsense. There was no joy in playing as the Rockets. I’m sorry.
9. Portland Trail Blazers – Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter – What’s remarkable about the Blazers duo is that both Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter have that same thing that Arn Anderson does where no matter what age they are, they appear to be 47 years old. In 1993, Drexler and Porter were only 30 and 29, respectively, but go back and look at them. They looked like they’d rather be watching a war movie or listening to Bob Seger than playing basketball.
8. Orlando Magic – Shaquille O’Neal and Scott Skiles – Imagine being the poor guy who thought “I won’t play NBA Jam at the arcade – I’ll just wait until it comes out for Super Nintendo,” waited, fired it up on the SNES and picked the Magic. Wait a minute. Nick Anderson? Is that my science teacher? (No, that’s Scott Skiles, but I can see why you thought that.) Where is Shaq? My friend, Shaquille O’Neal was not there. Shaquille O’Neal watched over his likeness much like MJ did, so he was able to pull himself out of the home release of NBA Jam. In order to harness the ferocity of a young Shaq in the paint, you had to be at the arcade. If you wanted to play as Shaq at home, you had to wait until 1994 for Shaq Fu, a Mortal Kombat clone that was somehow worse than it sounds.
7. New York Knicks – Patrick Ewing and Charles Oakley – The Knicks would offer a more balanced roster on the home consoles with the addition of John Starks, but the all-frontcourt duo of Ewing and Oakley was still one to be reckoned with in the arcade.
6. Golden State Warriors – Tim Hardaway and Chris Mullin – A duo like Chris Mullin and Tim Hardaway is what this game was made for. Don Nelson’s Dubs teams were all run-and-gun and you could try to replicate that as best you could at the arcade with those two.
5. Atlanta Hawks – Dominique Wilkins and Stacey Augmon – When you think of players who might be capable of doing NBA Jam-type dunks in real life, the one name at the top of that list was Dominique Wilkins. Sure, you could still play as ‘Nique in Bulls vs. Blazers and the NBA Playoffs and other basketball games available at that time, but you couldn’t make him reverse jam from the three-point arc like you could in NBA Jam...you know, like you were pretty sure he could do in reality, but only didn’t do that not to embarrass anybody else. Stacey Augmon was cool, too, so let’s not forget about him.
4. Phoenix Suns – Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle – Barkley was a weird one because he actually was in certain home console versions of the game, but not others released a little bit later. Why? Because he signed a deal with a company called Accolade to produce Barkley Shut Up and Jam!, a streetball game for the SNES and Genesis that was suspiciously similar to NBA Jam, but not nearly as good. I don’t know what they paid him, but he should have stuck with NBA Jam because the Barkley-Majerle combo was fun as hell. I’m sorry, Kevin Johnson, but you just couldn’t do what Sir Charles could.
3. Seattle SuperSonics – Shawn Kemp and Benoit Benjamin – Shawn Kemp was one of the greatest dunkers in NBA history, so naturally you’d think he would translate well to NBA Jam. But the difference between him and a guy like Dominique Wilkins is that, while Wilkins had style and ability for days, Kemp had malice and swagger to everything he did. He enjoyed posterizing his opponents. He reveled in it. With Wilkins, when you got dunked on, it was like “Well, what are you gonna do?” With the Reign Man, it was “Oh, no. Why me? I can no longer look my children in the eye.” Few players had an ethos that synced up as well as Kemp’s did with NBA Jam. He was tailor-made for it.
2. Utah Jazz – Karl Malone and John Stockton – They were a Hall of Fame duo on the court and they were as good as they come in NBA Jam. Stockton and the Mailman had it all – smothering defence, the ability to hit from deep and Malone could dunk with the best of them. For some – like Vernon Maxwell, you would have to assume – it meant getting past their terrible uniforms (that have since aged well in retrospect) to pick the Jazz, but if you wanted to rule whatever arcade you were in, Utah was a safe and smart choice.
1. Indiana Pacers – Reggie Miller and Detlef Schrempf – I never pretended this list was anything more than my own personal preference, but I have a very good reason for putting the Pacers where they are. The name of the game in NBA Jam was about finding balance in your duo, but in Reggie Miller alone, you had that in a single player. If you picked, let’s say, John Stockton or Mark Price, you were sacrificing the ability to dunk for hitting from three consistently. If you went with Larry Johnson, you got all the dunking you wanted – and to be fair, that’s probably all you wanted – but none of the deep balls. Now, ideally the other member of your duo carried that other end of the game that one didn’t, but with Reggie, you didn’t need anybody else. Miller could produce the highlight-reel slams and have deadly aim from three. There was nobody more well-rounded or fun to play with than Reggie Miller. Also, those mid-‘90s Pacers uniforms were dope as hell.
