Haha you say NBA Live developers don't know much about programming and then you say you have a 7900 Pro. Okay, kid... The fact is that NBA Live 2003 runs decently on most computers, and it's not the game, rather it's the users' setup and/or driver and hardware conflicts that cause the game to not run smoothly.
The fact of the matter is that even people with the lowly Ge4 MX cards can run NBA Live 2003 well, and that alone should tell you that there's something wrong with your set-up.
My Specs:
Athlon XP 2000+
512 MB DDR 2700
Albatron GeForce 4 Ti-4200P Turbo (overclocked to 4600 levels)
Windows XP Professional
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Mobo