I’ll be up in British Columbia for the rest of this week, spending a little time with NBA Live 09 and its development team in their lovely studio in Burnaby, just east of Vancouver proper.

As Kotaku revealed on Tuesday, San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker has been named the cover athlete for the basketball title, and with the NBA Draft on Thursday, it’s possible that the design team has something special to share.

If nothing else, I’ll spend quality time with the game, pick the developers’ brains and discuss what’s to come with some of the best basketball gamers around.

Wednesday’s going to be a travel day and the Thursday schedule is completely packed with meetings and presentations from the early morning until late in the evening. I’m due to land back in Denver in the late afternoon on Friday, so with any luck, I’ll be able to share what I’ve learned late Friday afternoon.

I’m intrigued to see what’s become of NBA Live, a series that took great strides forward last year. With improved defense and some more polish, the game could be ready to compete with - and perhaps even surpass - 2K Sports’ NBA 2K series, a notion that would have been quite impossible a scant few years ago.

If you have any questions for me, or if you have something that I might be able to discuss with the NBA Live 09 development team on Thursday, please feel free to leave them in the comments thread. I’ll be sure to check them out this evening and I’ll see what I can find out later this week.

The 2007-08 NBA season might have just wrapped up, but for EA Canada, the NBA Live 09 season has just begun.