NHL and NBA have been working together for a while since a lot of features are similar such as Dynasty mode, Season mode, and Online Team Play. But we wanted to take it one step further. NHL has been incredibly successful over the last few years, and the NBA franchise could greatly benefit from the learnings we have had on NHL. I had a vision and design for what I thought the NBA game could be both on and off the court and brought that vision to a few other people at EA. We got a prototype up and running, and it really caught on internally.