NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

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NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Thu May 27, 2021 2:35 pm

Hey everyone,

General: To start, I am actually not sure there is any market for what I have been working on since getting my new computer. I believe from play stats that 2K19 isn't as popular now as say 2K14 was post server death, but I'm about 3 teams (2 classics and 1 modern) in on a few tendencies, heights, positions, peaks, and intangible/potential rating changes for the most up-to-date standard 2K rosters for 2K19. Since the servers went down and this computer had to install the game all my previous work for rosters and drafts are completely gone and corrupted now (even when trying to grab them from the old CPU). As a warning for anyone in a similar boat, unless you have to be sure not to transition the game install without backups on your files. Also as a heads up, I only have time nowadays to really edit ~15 players a day (AKA 1 team per day) with the rest of my time going to work and family. So I can edit everything but Free Agency ideally by next month. My hope is to get these completed not long after that point entirely with Free Agency included.

About the rosters: I think it is important to note before getting into my philosophy for changes, I have been testing my changes with the 2K Popboy sliders from YouTube for 2K19 and they have been excellent for me thus far. I'm hoping for other players who are coming back to the game it would help them as well to know how my rosters are working and what slider set I used to work with them. Especially when they are completed to date. I'd recommend using his sliders in general (though some tendencies get weird) and his MyLeague settings that he made for 2K20 (with the caveat of leaving the money alone). I'll also be planning on updating post-every Playoff and Regular Season as long as I continue to play the game with these roster sets.

This leads to my first philosophy with my rosters which people may not like: I base Potential on real life production. I do not randomly assume potential based on assumed progression because of the "Ben Simmons" comps. To clarify what I mean, Ben Simmons to this point in his career has had his best overall season (measured by a few impact metrics) his rookie season. He has yet to quite get back to that point with his measurable production (though he got close in 2020 as his per 48 numbers were comparable) so to assume he should hit around a 90 in his prime just isn't accurate so far in his career. The league caught up to him by figuring out his shooting preferences and thus made him less effective. (Also the additions of Tobias and Butler didn't help his immediate growth with him needing more on-ball roles for his high production). With all of that said, in my roster Ben is an 85 Overall with an 87 Potential (his height in his rookie season by my metrics). He hasn't yet proven beyond that level.

Which leads to my other philosophies about player development which is tied to Peaks, Playoff impact, and Prime. I average all peak ages first to be 25-28 unless a player proves beyond that scale. The reason I do this is because of a report I did in College and a meeting I had then with an ESPN Rep. I took ~550 of the most popular NBA players in NBA history and tracked their impact year by year to see their highest peaks and ideal prime by their impact. To do this, I used a combination of Win Shares (only as a catch), BPM, VORP to track actual production and scaled for minutes as best I could. It measured the major players from '74 to now and discovered the two highest peaks by far either occurred at 25 or 27 and most "primes" actually cut around the latter gradually or drop off quickly from there. Now it is more commonly reported with ESPN openly with their reports regarding data. Though, I will also clarify, it was actually well known before they began having it on TV (at least among NBA analysts). In my single meeting with that ESPN rep, she indicated they had people a few years prior to me discover similar phenomenon as the "athletic peak" around 24-25 and "mental peak" at 27-28. Though they also still overvalue high profile players post-common peaks more than what my metrics revealed historically to be ideally true. So, long story short, I use this as my average just to prevent more editing for me for dual peaks and/or to catch high peak players like Derrick Rose who had their high points cut due to injury but who has shown high enough production late in age to not have "fallen off a cliff." Basically trying to make sure those types of players don't decline too much by age 27. JJ Redick, as an example, had his highest impact season at 31 for the Clippers. His peak in my roster is 25-32 because he reached his athletic peak by 25, but continued working on his skill to his highest point at age 31. This means his potential of 81 in my roster can be achieved at the same time he did in real life. It also could occur earlier with my logic (which he could have done with better playmakers and schemes using him in Orlando).

With Playoff Impact, I don't count Playoffs in my ratings unless the player has significant minutes. I actually use a catch with VORP to have a 2+ minimum to count any Playoff stats for that player. The reason for this is to prevent the "Robert Horry" effect. Essentially what that is, is using Win Shares or BPM to track production and you will see Robert Horry actually had his by far best time of tracked play in the playoffs in 2005. He had a BPM of 7.5 and almost had a .200 Win Share / 48. That is a ridiculous level of impact given his minutes, but he was also playing 27 minutes a game against often other role players coming off the bench. Due to this, using these numbers unchecked that would make his potential and overall in my ratings around a 95 in 2005. I don't know about you, but while Horry was good, he was just not that level of good. It was an anomaly that occurred with a great scheme and rotational game plan that the Spurs had used during that year's Playoff run which boosted his impact ridiculously vs his career average. I found from doing these before that VORP actually does a good job catching these types of players as it requires a consistency and a bigger sample size to hit a 2 VORP in the playoffs.

Moving from player progressions, my next major point of philosophy would be regarding tendencies. This will be my last point I really talk about regarding the rosters as they kind of lump together. I use per possessions and per 36 shot attempts to find out my shot tendencies. I also use Shot Location charts 1 for 1 to have the player's shot location data. Moving to touches, right now I'm using USG% to figure out my touches rating. It isn't ideal as there are better shot creation metrics (like Ben Taylor's aka Thinking Basketball's metrics), but they are behind paywalls and I'm not dedicated enough to the realism to get that granular. The cost there just isn't worth it to me. The same thing is true with Dish to Open Man tendency. I actually don't touch this tendency because I only have access to AST% and it wrongly assumes a few things and has a weird scale with high volume on the ball easy passers getting good numbers but shot creators who are also willing passers are too low with the number (discovered this with Bird having on average 4 assists in test but shot 24 times and missed looks he would normally pass to as the CPU decided to shoot now even over 2 defenders). So I just leave it for now to 2K's default as that seems to perform well enough so far. Finally I do edit fouls. I use similar metrics as I do for Shot attempts and edit fouls that way to give a more realistic high number for most players.

Questions: First, do you guys know where I could host this roster to share with everyone who's interested? I'm older, so file hubs I used to know are primarily behind paywalls now or just entirely gone. I also am wondering if people know of good draft classes for 2K19 that I can use as a base to help keep these going with realism? With the servers gone Steam has no connection to anything so I'm without anything as a base. Also, I am admittedly not good at balancing rosters beyond tendencies and have very little skills in editing attributes (last time I tried, my scale was so different from 2K it broke the game). If anyone has those skills and good solid realistic drafts (or even a better base than 2K's standard rosters for 2018-19) I can use to base similar to my rosters, I'd really appreciate it!

TLDR: I will be posting realistic 2018-19 rosters mostly changing Peaks, Tendencies, Heights, Positions to real life levels as I develop them. I would like to have realistic draft classes to also add and edit to have similar structure if someone knows where these would be / has sets they work on (which all don't mind that I use for the base of this project). I'm using 2K Roster defaults for this project, and if anyone has a better base roster to use with attributes that they don't mind me using as a base, I'd also appreciate that! Thanks!
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Re: NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Fri May 28, 2021 4:37 am

As an update, I now have the 76ers and the Lakers completed to the detail above. I have also begun editing Coach's attributes if they are real-life coaches with Head Coach experience and that seems to be working to make teams perform closer to real-life styles. The Lakers, in particular, were playing better under Walton than they did in real-life in my earlier test without the edits. With the edits they had to heavily depend on LeBron to compete with the 76ers (which was what they were doing in real life). I'm doing this by using Team Ratings to decide each coach's rating.

I'm considering attempting attributes again by doing the Shot attributes (close, mid, 3-point) as well as steals, blocks, and the "Dish to Open Man" tendency to be close to real-life. The reason why is really related to the Laker's young players. While Ingram and Ball have developed better in New Orleans, in LA in 2019, Ingram in particular is just rated too highly. Kuzma is also here as he never was a 78 overall player. He was promising at most as a 73-74 overall, but I can't get him any lower thanks to his high attributes.

I'm also considering after to incorporate the coach's tendencies that SimWorld used in their roster file. I'm going to use my game today to test the attributes and then see from there with the coach's tendencies. Mainly play with things to see if they break the game or not.

I'm skeptical of my ability, but I have concern mainly of the shot attributes. They will increase as modern players are very good offensively. If they don't break the game though, I'll also be adding them to my edits for every team. I'm using another roster file to test out and see how they go.

I've added below the most interesting ratings I currently have without the experimental edits I'm thinking about.

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Re: NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Fri May 28, 2021 7:20 am

I attempted editing attributes and ran the first test game. As a CPU vs. CPU game, I think the results were okay, though not 100% ideal. It was 76ers vs. 76ers though, so I'm going to give a few other attempts before really seeing what I have with these changes. For this individual game, both teams actually attacked each other 100% differently. The losing team got way more 3-Point attempts off double teams. Their stars actually played worse outside of Embiid as well. While I didn't snap the picture, Ben Simmons shot 30% from the floor as Butler shot 5-15. The winning team, as you can see, had good distribution among their stars. They also shot the 3 very poorly. The game came down to a last second buzzer beater attempt by the losing Embiid.

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Re: NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Sat May 29, 2021 1:00 pm

Turns out I was right about my attribute making abilities breaking the game. I did a few more tests using that edition and there were 3x in the first half where both teams shot over 70% and 2x where one team shot close to perfect. The 3s attempted ironically weren't even the issue with the CPU vs. CPU games. It appeared one team just barreled into the paint and the other team couldn't stop cuts. In that same game the other team were the 65% mid-range jump shooters who boosted it with a lot fewer attempts inside but still over 88%. I think one team in those attempts had a working FG% at the half at 86% with large volume inside the paint and another time one had over 90% (the Lakers with LeBron and Rondo having over 8 assists each) primarily off cuts and quick drives. It is very odd given the sliders usually stop those percentages being that high in games I play (between 45-50% regularly). Regardless of the reason, it does say my scoring abilities were too high for the CPU to handle even if they are more correct given stats. I also lowered consistency in these attempts where almost 90% of the players had 25 Off and Def consistency (given real life most players have off nights frequently despite their skill). When doing one test run with me playing, the teams did shoot close to 50%, but my assumption for this is due to the double-team mechanics. I play player locked so I think what the CPU does is automatically defend me with doubles for drive and post. That left 3s opened more than the CPU vs. CPU games and lowered our overall percentage but had us score more effectively with the higher volume of 3s. For the games I play, I also set up the defensive plan so there were few bad rotations and the teams played less aggressively to the inside lowering their percentages tremendously.

To get even more gritty about what happened in those CPU vs. CPU sims, when Simmons drove the defense would just not collapse on him. They stuck to Tobias, Redick, Butler, and Embiid (mid) like glue. The Lakers had a similar issue where only Lonzo's man played off to help LeBron (I'm guessing because JaVale was such a lob threat) and even that rotation was late or gave too big an angle for Ball to cut. LeBron acted so quick to pass or score that Lonzo had a free lane inside before the defender could stop him. The other thing that was frequently happening was when he or Rondo brought the ball up, the off-ball man would cut and the on-ball passer didn't take a second to whizz it by the defender. I noticed what was happening for the defense (that doesn't happen when the game has close to default ratings) is that help defense becomes weak as the team's shooting draws gravity. So in these instances, when the Lakers had Muscala playing the 5, they had 4 good enough shooters around LeBron and couldn't stop any drives. The logic just didn't seem to know what to do to stop the cuts. I'm also not going to use the Simworld coach edits either for similar reasons in how it breaks the game's logic built in. The edits force odd plays which actually makes the players on default have bad positioning for their plays. I know they also edit their plays so that is why I think it makes for default just not an ideal situation. It often caused the opposite effect to happen where the play left 4 seconds on the clock for someone like JaVale to jack up a 3.

Anyway, I say all this to say I am not going to further edit attributes and most settings that will break the game. The game ran well 1x out of 5 attempts when just looking at attributes, and the number dwindled to 1 out of 8 attempts when adding in coaching edits to their tendencies. Admittedly, I had a few trials running without watching it as I had other things going on, but it appears overall the defense just didn't know how to defend teams that have full rotations of very viable jump shooters. I assume that is why the base roster has good-great open jump shooters with terrible contact and dribble shooters (even if that isn't the most realistic on paper). It does seem to give the most realistic result of teams when looking at mostly default ratings. The other possibility I've thought about is that I had access when I did my rosters just for me to more advanced analytics that allowed me to edit defensive IQs. I was probably then able to counter the high offense with higher IQ'd defenders that just read plays better. I'm not sure on that though.

My edits will from here on just include Overalls (via Intangibles [NOTE: while researching, I saw a theory from 2KLabs in 2K17 era that buzzer beaters work off this stat so maybe when you play increase your clutch player's intangibles if you're wanting them to hit those shots]), Potential, Tendencies (now with Dish to Open Man%), Coach Attributes, and Player Rotations (I'll be giving you my ideal roster and the number of players in the gameplan I'd have each coach use in the regular season to simulate real life). Everything else I tested as trial just didn't work and won't be ideal. I've continued looking for drafts also outside of the servers and I still haven't had luck finding a base for the 2019 or 2020 draft. I'm working on Milwaukee now and hopefully that will continue giving good results for these base edits as the Lakers and 76ers have.
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Re: NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Sun May 30, 2021 10:07 am

So, I'm a dirty liar. Because I have taken the time today to readjust my formulas to do attributes cleanly with these rosters. I now have a fairly good working adjustment for 2K19 default defenses with my attribute ratings. For others wanting to look into this, you'll want to adjust your floors. The issue I was running into was forcing a default consistency that was around 50 for mid-range shooting to try and combat low attempts but higher %. It boosted all decent shooters to great and thus had them too good for NBA 2K19. So, what I've done now, is measure it to be an absolute 25-99 scale for all attributes I'm modifying. I also adjust for attempts better now by decreasing incrementally by how far the shot attempts were from 10% of the player's shots. It's made for where testing (I ran a test with a 8 man rotation of the 96 Bulls and SuperSonics as well as the 19 76ers and Lakers) the teams were fairly close to their actual FG%. Again, I am using 2K Popboy's sliders from YouTube so that also most likely has a huge reason for the fairly close FG% across the board.

Also with that said, I have completed a Zion Williamson and Ja Morant. I haven't done any other players from the 19 Draft Class yet, and I suspect it will take me longer to complete them all since they require a complete base before making edits. Ja Morant I have as a 75 Overall with 75 Potential (again I'll adjust these as time goes on, if these Playoffs are an indicator, Ja by next Season will have a Potential boost). Ja also benefits from his athleticism. The game overvalues certain stats based on position. So Ja, realistically should have a 70 Overall at this point with a 70 Potential. For reference, so far this playoffs (ignoring sample size) I have Morant at like an 85. I just couldn't get him lower without giving up some athleticism. Zion I have as a 70 Overall (Small sample size that season which hurt his Overall) with a 79 Potential. He also gets a boost from his athleticism, I have him at a 69 for the season, but again couldn't get that last point. Zion is probably more controversial than Morant among fans because of his hype. The guy is a monster inside player, but a poor-average defender and has rebounding issues. For a Power Forward in 2K he gets hit a lot due to his height and rebounding being low. If I ignored his sample size and just rated what he did play that season I would have Zion's rookie campaign as a 73. Anyway, I'm rather proud of my Morant CAP, though my Zion is rough. I have very little talent at making CAPs though, so if other people know how to edit these better, LMK.

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Re: NBA 2K19 Realistic Rosters & A Few Questions

Postby wdt92 on Mon May 31, 2021 6:12 pm

So this project will be on hold (or possibly be over) until I can find a fix for an error I have run across in the game. I don't know if anyone is interested or cares that much seeing as no one has posted, but I'm hoping maybe someone has the answer for the problem now that my searching has proven for not. What has happened is that I cannot go into the edit menu without the game crashing to desktop completely every time. I don't know what started it Sunday as Saturday it worked great, but I haven't been able to edit a single player since. I have had a crash on R.J. Barrett alone multiple times and I've tried main roster guys with the same result. I'm just thankful the crash hasn't occurred when trying to save a file cause then everything would have been corrupted.

I have already tried uninstalling and reinstalling as well as setting the game to high priority. Those were the two fixes I have seen (though they were for 2K16 & 2K18). The game works fine when running a play now session or MyLeague. It is just when I try to go to the edit menu that it crashes now. It isn't even the roster changing that is an issue as I can run a quick edit fine. Every other game (which admittedly is only 2) I've tested works great. CyberPunk 2077, as an example, runs on high settings without any crashes for over 2 hours of playtime consistently. Any ideas to fix this would be excellent! If there's no one else who has run across this though, I mean it sucks but it's not the end of the world. Everyone has more important things than a game I'm sure. Thanks for any help available ahead of time!
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