The best sports games like NBA Jam are NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, NBA Street Vol. 2 and NFL Blitz. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to sports costs you.
Filtering to sports means you want the shape of a real game without necessarily wanting the rulebook. Most of the memorable ones throw the rules out entirely.
What you get: Something anybody can join. Arcade sports games are the easiest genre to hand to someone who does not play games.
What made NBA Jam worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the sports part of that answer, and only the sports part.
The last proper entry, and the best-playing version of the formula.
The other great arcade basketball game, and just as stylish.
The same studio doing to American football what Jam did to basketball.
Arcade sport reduced to its purest competitive form.
For the arcade-sport-with-personality feel in a different shape.
The modern version of unserious sport with items.
The best arcade sports game currently being played.
Nintendo's arcade sports design from the same era.
Arcade-leaning sport that still plays properly.
Depth, in the arcade ones, and accessibility in the simulations. Very few sports games manage both.
The full list is on games like NBA Jam — 9 picks, no genre filter.
NBA Jam: On Fire Edition. The last proper entry, and the best-playing version of the formula.
No. NBA Jam released on the Super Nintendo, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
For the arcade picks, no — they do not use the real rules anyway. For the simulations, it helps a lot.
Usually not. The on-pitch changes between years are small and last year's version is a fraction of the price, unless you play the online team modes where the population moves across.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full NBA Jam list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is sports — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the sports guide for where to start in the genre generally.