When I first saw the final score to the 2016 NBA All-Star Game, I thought that I was looking at a screen capture for like a video game or something. Like when sports pundits are having a slow news day, so they do fluffy shit like video game simulations of upcoming real-life sporting events, just so they can have something to talk about. I didn’t realize that the 196 points that the Western Conference All-Stars put up in their 196-173 win over the East, was actually reality.
Name an NBA video game of the 90s; NBA Jam, Tecmo NBA, EA’s NBA Live 94-98. I was pretty good at all of those games.
But scoring 196 points in any of them required some pretty exceptional circumstances in order to pull off, and most certainly not as likely against human opponents. Like NBA Jam would require the perma-fire code and use of Detlef Schrempf to rain three pointers to run up the score. And in Tecmo or Live, I’d most certainly have to set the games to play actual 12 minute quarters, and probably turn fouls off, so I could clobber the AI opponents, steal the ball and score at will. Even with these kinds of conditions, scoring nearly 200 points was never that easy of a feat. In a video game.