In 2K’s world, the Lakers are the massive favorites.Ībove: The Lakers start out every “Power Rankings” as the favorites, and that’s not big market bias. In real life, this is an interesting team with a ton of question marks that has championship potential if it can answer those. This is despite that, although James and Davis are indeed superstars, the Lakers traded … almost every other decent player on their roster. 2K loves this, with NBA 2K20 giving the Lakers its highest rating of 97. So this past offseason, the Lakers traded almost all their promising young players to New Orleans for another superstar, Anthony Davis. It turns out even Lebron needs teammates. NBA 2K19 gave them a team rating of 90 - a point above the Bucks, who had the best record in the league - and they hilariously and not that surprisingly missed the playoffs. Which is all a long way of saying that NBA 2K really, really likes the Los Angeles Lakers.Ī year ago, the Lakers signed Lebron James, finally arresting their post-Kobe Bryant collapse that had made them hilariously incompetent. In other words, it might say a team has a 98 rating because of players’ stats, but it won’t necessarily simulate that team as being better than a team with a 90 rating. Now, this is an imperfect representation of how good a team is, basically a messy average of the game’s complicated set of ratings for individual players.
That done, there’s a major way NBA 2K20 makes an initial prediction: the team rating. For example, I switched the Sixers’ Josh Richardson to shooting guard, so that the giant five starters Philadelphia expects to run with will load into the starting lineup, instead of unproven rookie Matisse Thybulle. I also fiddled with a few players’ positions because NBA 2K20 would consistently put much worse players over good players’ secondary roles. ( Note: These simulations were mostly done in mid-September, so new patches may change things.) I also fiddled with these numbers up and down to give different potential outcomes, such as if Thompson comes back midseason or doesn’t come at all. So I had to manually add six injuries to stars: roughly two months for Victor Oladipo (Indiana), four months for Jusuf Nurkic (Portland), six for Klay Thompson (Golden State), eight for Durant (Brooklyn), 10 for John Wall (Washington), and the season for DeMarcus Cousins (LA Lakers) - estimates all, but pretty essential for the story of the league right now. So how does NBA 2K attempt to model this? Well, in one way, oddly - long-term injuries are one of the biggest stories of the league, in particular with the Kevin Durant, arguably the best player alive right now, almost certain to miss the entire year - but 2K doesn’t actually have those injuries in the game right now (though I assume they’ll show up when the season starts). In a league that’s traditionally been one where massive, years-long dynasties clash with one another, this is a level of chaos that hasn’t been seen since probably the 1999 season, when Michael Jordan’s retirement and a lockout-shortened season essentially guaranteed chaos. The NBA itself is advertising how “the basketball world has changed” with an ad showcasing five of the most-altered teams to build hype for the season. This is especially the case in the Western Conference, where seven teams - the Warriors, Lakers, Clippers, Rockets, Jazz, Nuggets, and Trail Blazers - can all go into the season thinking they should at least make the conference finals (only two teams will). It all adds up to this: The NBA has up to a dozen teams that seem like they could have a shot to win the title, and a bunch more who should be quite good. And several of the consistent contenders took big risks that might or might not work, like the Rockets trading for mercurial guard Russell Westbrook. Almost every superteam like the Warriors or Celtics got weaker, while almost every pretty good team like the Utah Jazz or the Brooklyn Nets got better, and a few mediocre teams like the Lakers got much better. The basic trend of the offseason what that the superteam model - a team with three or four All-Stars and not much depth - gave way to multiple “dynamic duos” with two stars and a strong cast of role-players.
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In other words, the 2K19 season was fairly easy to predict in broad strokes from the outside, and NBA 2K19 mostly did so.īut in the offseason, the league went wild with trades and free agency - the Warriors, the dominant team of the past half-decade, got shattered by injury and free agency.
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NBA 2K19 largely modeled this - using its last patch (with a few injuries added), those six teams were in the top nine, with only the Lost Angeles Lakers, Spurs, and the disappointing Oklahoma Thunder having high team ratings. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.
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