It’s that time of the year when the cover athletes for the upcoming NBA games become a topic of discussion. Given that the NBA Live cover is expected to be announced first and that 2K has shown the tendency to stick with one guy for multiple years (considering the season Chris Paul had that seems likely to continue) this will be a breakdown of the most likely candidates for the NBA Live 09 cover.

Over the past three years the cover of NBA Live has been announced between late April and mid-June. In 06 it was Dwayne Wade (May 9th), in 07 it was Tracy McGrady (June 21st), followed by 08’s Gilbert Arenas (April 28th). Typically they’d like to announce it when interest in the NBA is high and that certainly is never more than during playoff time. It wouldn’t be surprising if the news came out as early as this week.

The Live covers have generally gone to players who have been high profile, successful, and relatively young. With that in mind lets take a look at the top eight possibilities for the cover of NBA Live 09.

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Recently EA Sports revealed the first features for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. This year will bring about the addition of Tiger’s real life personal coach Hank Haney along with improvements to Gamernet and online play. This features trailer includes a look at those as well as tuning your clubs, new courses, and dynamic golfer skills.

I especially like how they’ve streamlined the online play experience while still including visual indications of how your opponents are doing. Continue on to view the trailer.

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It appears that Facebreaker will be the next EA Sports game to get a price reduction. This follows the releases of March Madness 08 and FIFA Street 3 ($50) and NFL Tour ($40) which all had an initial sale price lower than the standard.

Gamestop has now updated Facebreaker with the new information (”price drop” of $10) which turned out to be the first indications for those previous releases as well. As of now it looks as though Facebreaker will sell for $50 which is the same as the upcoming NFL Head Coach 09 sell for on its own.

Given that this is an arcade style game kicking off what EA would hope to become a franchise it makes a lot of sense to open it up at a lower price.  They’ve already put a great deal of effort into creating awareness around the title. Early indications seem to be that there is a lot of interest in the game so releasing at a lower price point will make it easier for those people to give it a chance. While many of the EA Sports franchises have become a yearly staple for consumers it makes new IP a challenging sell.