New NBA Jam Coming to Wii via EA Sports?

With EA Sports set to announce a mysterious "new game" sometime this month, the rumors continue to fly, with the latest pointing not to football, but basketball.

Citing "sources confirmed," ESPN reports that EA Sports has acquired the rights to the NBA Jam series and is readying a new Wii-exclusive entry. The long-lost over-the-top balling franchise, which emerged out of Midway in 1993, has laid dormant since 2003, when Acclaim produced a PlayStation 2 and Xbox entry simply titled "NBA Jam."

But while Acclaim and Midway both produced entries in the nearly twenty-year-old franchise, it seems the NBA itself has retained ownership of the "NBA Jam" property.

Of course, Destructoid recently chimed in, claiming that EA's "new game" is a Wii football trainer, but that doesn't automatically disprove either rumor. After all, EA Sports certainly has more than one unannounced project in the works, and one rumor specifies a revival of an existing franchise, while another points to a new property. Regardless of what happens, though, let's just hope the "boom," "shaka" and "laka" remain intact.