Additional games have been released on a variety of consoles, each with different characters and slightly altered gameplay mechanics.
The game's controls are set to mouse usage by default, capitalizing on a point & click style of gameplay to move characters around.
Each potential team member, including younger versions of Kevin Garnett and Lisa Leslie, is ranked according to five statistics operating on a 1 to 10 scale.
Players also have the option to customize rookie characters with either manually chosen or randomly allocated statistics, as well as heights, skin tones, shooting hands, birthdays, and names.
Some power-ups, however, provide detrimental effects, such as the icy ball (which makes shots more likely to miss), the stick of butter (which reduces the team's ball-handling abilities), and the ice cream truck (which prevents the entire team from moving for a brief period of time).
[7][8] The PlayStation 2 version was released in Europe under the name of Junior Sports Basketball, although it lacked any license from the NBA, and the Backyard Kids were redubbed with British voice actors.
[11] A fourth installment entitled Backyard Sports: NBA Basketball 2015 was released in early 2015 for mobile devices, featuring Stephen Curry as its primary mascot.
[12] In the United States, the debut version of Backyard Basketball sold 780,000 copies and earned $13.2 million by August 2006, after its release in October 2001.
Ivan Sulic of IGN awarded the original version a score of 6.5 out of 10, complimenting the simplistic gameplay and colorful graphics while lamenting the amount of crashes that the game is susceptible to encountering.
[14] Chris Adams of IGN awarded the 2007 Nintendo DS version the same score, commenting that the addition of new gameplay modes offered more variety.