Rumors

Taurean Prince was LeBron’s teammate last year. He would see LeBron watching Madden videos on YouTube all the time too. And he witnessed how great LeBron is firsthand. "It’s definitely true. I’ve caught an L from him before," Prince told SN. "I remember him bragging about beating ranked players. That’s something that happened often."

Sporting News

Dave McMenamin: Dalton Knecht, 23, on what he's learned about LeBron James, who turns 40 next week: "How much he loves to play Madden. He always talks about [it]...I didn’t really know it was that much. He watches it on the plane and stuff. He watches film just like it’s basketball. It’s crazy."

Twitter

David Morrow: Giannis Antetokounmpo, along with his brothers, Thanasis and Kostas, become the first NBA athletes ever featured in a Madden NFL game. The brothers will be added to new mode "The Yard," with Giannis also featured in Superstar KO. pic.twitter.com/nY0U1I9PMq

Twitter

EA is hosting a Madden NFL 21 tournament called The Homestand powered by ASUS this weekend featuring eight competitors, including several NBA players and an MMA fighter. The Homestand's first round kicks off Saturday at 4 p.m. ET with a matchup between Dallas Mavericks guard Seth Curry and Golden State Warriors forward Eric Paschall. Their game will be followed by three more first-round matchups, and the tournament's final will take place Monday at 4:30 p.m. ET.

ESPN

JuJu Smith-Schuster is not stopping his campaign to recruit James to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Smith-Schuster released a Madden video of James making highlight plays on the Steelers, a YouTube video explaining five "fire reasons" why James should join the Steelers, and the wide receiver said he'll be courtside at the Cavaliers-Clippers game on Friday night to try doing some in-person recruiting. The 22-year-old is going all out.

USA Today Sports

Seeing how Hayward uses video games as a stress reliever but still plays some seriously competitive titles, it’s interesting to hear him describe most of his fellow NBA players as “casual gamers.” According to him, “everyone plays video games… a lot of them will play Madden, 2K, FIFA, and everyone plays Call of Duty, but there aren't that many that play PC games.” He’s heard that Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs plays Starcraft as well, but hasn’t talked to him about it personally.

Collegiate StarLeague

Josh Lewenberg: A day in the life of injured DeMar DeRozan: "On the couch. If theres no basketball game on I'm playing Madden. That's been every single day"

Twitter

It's been over a year now since EA Sports turned "NBA Elite" into NBA Delete, cancelling the new console simulation franchise before it ever even hit stores. And while EA Sports has been mostly silent about their basketball plans beyond proclaiming a 2012 release and a change in development studios from EA Canada to Tiburon (the home of "Madden"), I was able to catch up with EA Sports president Andrew Wilson and ask him about the upcoming game and what the change in studios might mean for the title. "Anytime you're looking to reboot a franchise, you're looking to find a different type of creative energy," Wilson told me as I sat down with him at a recent EA Sports event. "When we rebooted the 'FIFA' franchise, we introduced a whole new team that rebuilt that engine from scratch. We did the same for 'NHL.' We completely rebooted and rebuilt that game with a new creative team. "And while the 'NBA' creative energy could've happened anywhere, it just so happened that we had some developers in the EA Tiburon studios who were very, very passionate basketball fans. The Orlando Magic literally train 100 yards from our studio there, so we have a big basketball culture built around that creative energy, and what we will deliver will be a fantastic game."

ESPN.com

It's never a good idea to completely shelve a game, but EA Sports might have made the tough call cancelling NBA Elite for the right reason. NBA Elite was supposed to be a rebirth. EA Sports renamed the NBA Live franchise and wanted to completely change the way that players went about controlling a basketball game. Unfortunately, the game sucked, and EA decided to pull the plug on a 2010 release, leaving NBA 2K11 as the sole basketball sim on the market this year. (I don't count NBA Jam as a sim, even though it is awesome.) The cancellation caused a shakeup in how sports games are managed at EA Sports to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Development of future NBA games have also been shifted from EA Canada to EA Tiburon, makers of the Madden franchise. EA Sports exec Andrew Wilson said that it was hard to make the choice to cancel the game, but that it had to be done in order to release a strong product.

The Escapist