What’s the purpose of a cover athlete on a sports game’s box art? In the olden days it was about legitimacy – if Robert Horry is endorsing this game, it MUST be good! Until the mid-1990s official NBA licenses weren’t to be taken for granted either, so seeing a recognizable player was a good visual shorthand for conveying to the consumer that ‘Hey, there are real NBA players in here.’
As time’s gone on, the practice has become considerably more abstract, not least because boxed copies of games are so much less prominent than digital storefront downloads. Fandom has evolved as NBA 2K and NBA Live became towering franchises (or at least long-running ones, in the latter’s case) and the very act of picking a cover athlete now sparks debate and even controversy within the community. It’s a way of honoring the greats, mourning the departed, highlighting the breakthrough talents, and tacitly communicating to a fanbase that this game is plugged into the basketball zeitgeist.
And while we’re still pretty salty that there’s no Tyler Herro NBA 2K cover yet, we’re also aware that it’s a tricky decision, choosing the right cover athlete. We know this, because we remember all the times basketball games got it wrong, or went against the grain with totally leftfield picks…
Gilbert Arenas – NBA Live 08
EA’s franchise was already starting to concede ground to NBA 2K in 2007 when NBA Live 08 released. The competition between the two was as heated as it’s ever been, and as the imperious old-timer, NBA Live needed a cover star to put the young upstart in its place. A Metta World Peace elbow to the face of the competition. It opted for Gilbert Arenas.
Not to throw shade at a three-time NBA all-star, three-time all-NBA team member and winner of the 2002-03 Most Improved Player award, but… Gilbert Arenas? It’s just hard to imagine anyone standing in a store aisle, wondering whether to drop 50 bucks on this new basketball game or not, and then seeing that face and deciding money was no object.
As luck would have it, Arenas would only play 13 games of the 2007-08 season due to knee injury, and only two the year after. In fact, until his retirement in 2011-12, Arenas played no more than 49 games in a single season after his cover appearance.
Chris Paul – NBA 2K8
In the very same year that EA decided Gilbert Arenas should be the face of its blockbuster basketball franchise, 2K also picked one of its most leftfield cover stars ever in CP3. Time definitely proved the execs right on this one – he’s a 12-time All-Star with more individual awards than we could possibly list, one of the best guards in modern history, and still playing high minutes for Phoenix right now. An incredible talent with equally incredible longevity.
But 2K really got ahead of this one. We knew Chris Paul was good in 2007, but we didn’t know he’d be that good. As it happened, the 2007-08 season would represent Paul’s career-high APG with 11.6 and second-highest PPG with 21.1. Given that 2K had played it very safe with established faces that transcended the game before this point, looking back it was a remarkably good decision with spooky foresight to make Paul a cover star in 2007.
Mitch Richmond – NBA Live ‘97
Let’s do a spot of word association, shall we? I’ll give you an idea or concept, and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Ready? Ok, here we go: The NBA in 1997… Correct. Mitch Richmond. That’s the only reasonable answer.
Again, no disrespect to the Sacramento shooting guard, who incidentally put up 25.9 PPG in the 1996-97 season. But Michael Jordan was bigger than the league itself during that dominant Bulls era. Seeing anyone but MJ on the cover looks weird in retrospect. Seeing Mitch Richmond, though, feels like you’ve fallen through a portal into an alternate universe where Netflicks(TM) has a documentary about the Kings’ incredible runs of championships in the ‘90s.
Ben Wallace – NBA 2K5
Look, the rules of basketball game cover art selection are very clear: you ARE allowed to select a defensive player, but only if that player is Shaquille O’Neal. Evidently, nobody at 2K checked the rulebook before NBA 2K5 went to the production line.
Wallace was a big deal at the time. Detroit had just won an unlikely NBA championship in 2004, beating the Lakers in five games thank in no small part to the 6’9” C/PF’s brick wall defense. Wallace’s his larger-than-life personality both on and off the court would have rendered him a recognizable face to most people strolling the sports game shelves at Gamestop.
Here’s the thing, though: this was the first NBA 2K game ever to feature a cover athlete that wasn’t Allen Iverson. 2K broke four years of tradition for Ben Wallace. And whereas Iverson is exactly the kind of player you want to be in videogames, all flashy dribbles and spectacular drives to the hoop, Wallace embodied all the things that were, especially at this time, extremely boring to do in games. Defensive positioning. Contesting shots. Rebounding. Would you buy Ben Wallace’s Rebounding 2005? Exactly.
Antoine Walker – NBA Live ‘99
MJ left a chasm in the league when he departed for a couple of years to deliberate over soda prices and parking fees for the Wizards. In his absence during the 1998-99 to 2000-01 seasons, the NBA needed a new superstar to step up and fill the void. With all the will in the world, not even Antoine Walker himself would claim he was that man.
Walker would, of course, earn himself a championship ring, but not for many years after his cover appearance on NBA Live ‘99. At that point in his career, he was a dependable 20-point power forward you didn’t want backing up against you in the key. In a perfect world, Kobe Bryant would have graced this cover, his Lakers taking the championship in 1999-2000 and he himself stepping up as the most convincing successor to Jordan’s throne. We may never know why Walker got the spot instead, but we can probably assume it had a lot to do with licensing fees. He’d already appeared as the cover star in NBA Courtside for the Nintendo 74 in 1998, so perhaps EA couldn’t snag the rights.
Hakeem Olajuwon – NBA ShootOut 98
This one has less to do with the choice of athlete, the Rockets legend Hakeem Olajuwon, and more about the specific image on the cover. Olajuwon was one of the big names of the ‘90s, putting up impressive numbers throughout the decade with his insane wingspan and air earning him plenty of blocks and dunks. People might reasonably have been swayed by his image on a game cover. So why is his image obscured to the point of anonymity on this one? The photograph is warped and stylized to the point that Olajuwon is just about recognizable as a human male. And if you really squint, you can still make out a Rockets logo on his almost completely saturated jersey. They might as well have used Othella Harrington on the front.
Secondly, the game is called NBA ShootOut ‘98. So what’s Olajuwon doing? Dunking, obviously.
Kyrie Irving – NBA 2K18
Wait wait wait. Kyrie is a generational talent. He’s decorated with more individual awards than it would be practical to list. He’s got a championship ring, and yet it still feels like he’s somehow underrated. Kyrie himself is not the issue with NBA 2K18’s cover.
The issue, as Cleveland and Boston fans will both remember very well, is that between the point at which 2K released the new game’s cover art and the start of the 2017-18 season, Kyrie requested a trade to the Cavs upper management, who granted it and sent him to Boston.
2K then had to rip up its original cover and release an updated version with Irving wearing a Celtics uniform. Not as bad as going to market with Mitch Richmond on your cover, but a slight headache.
Except then the following March, Irving suffered a debilitating knee injury that kept him out of the remainder of the season, and the entire post-season. If ever there was a point in Kyrie’s career not to be memorialized, it was this one.
Written by Phil Iwaniuk on behalf of GLHF.
