Did the Houston Rockets learn to play basketball from NBA Jam?
When I was a kid, every week in the summer my best friend and I would go to the schoolyard down the block to play basketball. The courts were basic: the hoops never had nets and the asphalt ground wasn’t level all the way around. Still, the yard was often full of restless neighborhood urchins idly dribbling on the sidelines waiting on “doubles” or “triples” to play a game. My favorite matches though were on off-days when we got to run smaller two-on-twos with other friends. These half-court graceless battles were fast paced, intense, and fiercely competitive.
Instead of going to basketball camp or attended shooting clinics we learned how to play basketball from watching TV, collecting trading cards, and shooting around in the schoolyard. Our playing style was therefore very simple and predictable. I was the ball handler and he was the “down-low” player (these designated roles were not by virtue of my dribbling ability or his polished footwork, but simply because he was two inches taller, having hit his pubescent growth spurt earlier). I would either shoot (and usually miss) from outside or feed my friend inside for a layup. I was an uncoordinated John Stockton and he was a scrawny, paler Karl Malone. He never really developed a post up game, and our pick-and-rolls more closely resembled random particle collisions from physics class. But we were having fun and didn’t have embarrassing vines or recorded stats to tell us otherwise.
The free-wheeling two-on-two style of play is best represented by the early 90’s arcade game NBA Jam. Remove teams’ role players and let the stars go at it. Outside of alley-oop dunks, cooperative play isn’t a priority and instead individual players showcase their skills in a limited rules, action-packed contest. A long range sharp shooter like Reggie Miller catches fire by chucking three threes in a row. A dominant big man like Shaq could shatter the backboard with a ferocious slam.
The most popular duos from the original NBA Jam often combine a three point machine with a beastly dunker. Stockton/Malone from the Utah Jazz, Majerle/Barkley on the Phoenix Suns, and Houston’s Smith/Olajuwon are good examples. Other successful tandems like Charlotte’s Mourning/LJ and The Bull’s Pippen/Grant (MJ wasn’t in the game) excelled in specific areas like rebounding and defense. But no one picked a team for its excellent midrange game.
That’s because the game discouraged jump shots. Good dunkers were rewarded with acrobatic, spinning, behind-the-back moves that embarrassed any defender in the nearby vicinity. Three point shooters were colorfully commentated with suspenseful announcements of “from downtown . . .” On the other hand jump shots from the elbow were just, well, blocked.
And so before SportsVU, before advanced stats metrics, and before the MIT Sloan Conference, there was NBA Jam. The Houston Rockets, the team most heralded for using advanced data analytics to facilitate adopting the strategy of high expected value shooting (layups/dunks or 3 pointers) was actually late to the idea, not early. Not to diminish the value of its role players, but over the last decade the team has been constructed to be the best NBA Jam team in the league. Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ General Manager, has said that to win a team needs (at least) two superstar caliber players. He tried with Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming and now he is trying again with James Harden and Dwight Howard.
But as the NBA just catches up the prescient wisdom of NBA Jam, it is already evolving into something new. Sure it would be tons of fun to play Jam as Harden/Howard, Durant/Westbrook, or as the Splash Brothers, but the most interesting teams in the modern NBA have a “Big-3” or even four key players over just a pair of stars. Think of the Spurs with Duncan/Parker/Manu/Kawhi, the Heat’s famous Lebron/Wade/Bosh trio, or the newer Cavs with Lebron/Irving/Love, or the older Celtics with Pierce/Garnett/Allen/Rondo. Even the Clippers’ Lob City now is incomplete without adding Deandre Jordan to the Paul/Blake combo.
Does team play and pace-and-space translate well to the arcade arena? “He’s spacing the floor!” and “That’s the extra pass we were looking for” don’t have the same ring as “Slamma Jamma!” and “He’s on Fire!” Fortunately, as the NBA gets smarter and more sophisticated, so do the fans. Newer basketball games like NBA 2K and EA Sport’s NBA Live series focus on team strategy unlike older games like Barkley Shut Up and Jam! and Jordan vs. Bird that romanticized the street ball mentality of individual player contributions and highlight reel posterizing. Sometimes life imitates art and other times video games imitate life.
