Creative.
I wholeheartedly agree the constant desire to reboot the series has been one of the main (if not the main) causes of NBA Live's downfall. A few missteps on their first couple of releases for the current generation certainly didn't help, but instead of correcting them and building upon what they have, they've taken too many steps backwards resulting in more bugs, fewer game modes and features and lost ground on the NBA 2K series. Not that "fixing the cracks in the foundation" (as they once put it) is a bad idea per se, but rebuilding every year hasn't been the right way to go.
Even if it wasn't a huge money maker, dropping the PC version definitely had to be a blow. Perhaps the expectation was that people would migrate to NBA Live on the consoles but by that point a lot of people felt burned by the product so if they did pick up a console, they went with NBA 2K anyway. And of course, NBA 2K has had a PC release each of the last three years so they've been able to sweep in and win over a good portion of PC gamers who were previously Live players.
Based on the feedback I've been getting through the Wishlist Survey, a fair amount of people still want to see NBA Live/Elite succeed so there's two strong brands out there and support a PC release; most of the people who have responded to the survey have also indicated that they have PCs that can run the latest games, so that should no longer be an issue. I hope we haven't seen the end of the brand and that they can bounce back strong with NBA Elite 12.