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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some reflections on how there are times that I miss dice roll shooting mechanics in basketball video games.

At this point, it’s a safe bet to say that Green Releases will remain a fixture of NBA 2K’s shooting mechanics moving forward. It’s just a matter of how they’re handled, and whether there are any additional controls and mechanics such as shot aiming or rhythm shooting with the right stick. In recent years, the “Green or Miss” approach to shooting has been particularly contentious. On one hand, it rewards skilful input with a guaranteed result (blocked attempts notwithstanding). On the other hand, it’s not necessarily accessible, or preferable for offline play.

It’s funny to revisit the discourse around Green Releases back in 2017, when Mike Wang spoke of a desire to wean gamers off of the idea that they should be guaranteed baskets. “Green or Miss” certainly goes against that aim, demonstrating how attitudes have changed as NBA 2K has increasingly catered to the online scene. Personally, I’m in favour of Green Releases being guaranteed, very good or near-perfect releases still being reliable, and then progressively lower odds of success as the timing gets worse. To that point, while I wouldn’t change the approach of Green Releases always being successful, I must admit that I sometimes miss the old dice roll shooting mechanics.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #624 of the NLSC Podcast!

A new mixtape trailer featuring three former NBA MVPs has been posted for NBA The Run, Play By Play Studios’ 3-on-3 online PvP streetball game scheduled for release in 2026. This week we’re reacting to the trailer, and also break down some information that was provided in a recently re-posted Q&A that Play By Play held on X back in December. The community also weighs in with their thoughts on the latest previews, including their current level of excitement and how much they’d be willing to pay for a basketball video game that’s online-only; a drawback that apparently not everyone is aware of! Unsurprisingly, there are some common concerns and criticisms that we certainly share.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:11:07 — 49.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on how “press steal to foul” is a lazy approach to designing defensive mechanics in basketball video games.

There’s a clear interest in and emphasis on skill-based mechanics in NBA 2K these days. From sweats in the online scene sneering “get good” to developer blogs touting a focus on representing the “skill gap”, there’s a belief that NBA 2K’s gameplay must be a worthy test of one’s reflexes and abilities on the sticks. Accessibility? Realism? Fun? Go play a mobile puzzle game if that’s what you want, you filthy casual! That’s the attitude that NBA 2K has been increasingly catering to, and gameplay has taken a dip in quality because of it. At least one game developer saw that coming.

The irony of course is that thanks to canned and animation-heavy sequences, to say nothing of artificial boosts, imbalance, and paying to skip the grind, it’s laughable to suggest that NBA 2K is a pure test of stick skills! Moreover, when the mechanics are broken or poorly designed, it becomes a test of a gamer’s patience and willingness to compensate for a flawed system, rather than their ability to be strategic and skilful. Like a carpenter with a dull saw and a headless hammer, we’re impeded by the tools we have at our disposal. In short, we need a game’s mechanics to work and be useful in order to expertly employ them. To that end, “press steal to foul” is lazy design.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on how the door has seemingly closed on NBA Live.

Although NBA Live has remained dormant since 2019, I’ve still had plenty of reasons to write about it. Older releases have re-entered my rotation, and I’ve developed more of an appreciation for them. There are some that I’d like to dust off more often, and even mod. I’ve talked about the opportunities the series has had, and some of the ones that it’s squandered. I’ve lamented how both the series and its long-time fans deserved better. Above all, I’ve continued to champion the need for alternatives, and noted how despite numerous setbacks, somehow the door has remained open for NBA Live.

However, with the shutdown of NBA Live 19’s servers and no new release on the horizon, it feels as though the door has finally closed. I could be wrong here, and it’s certainly not the outcome that I wanted. I still believe in the importance of having at least two viable sim options on the market, and I’ll continue to advocate for that. Even if a return for NBA Live is as highly unlikely as it seems, there’s arguably still a better chance of that happening than another developer stepping up to try to compete with NBA 2K. For now though, with online support for NBA Live 19 ending and NBA Live Mobile being the last vestige of the series, the door has seemingly slammed shut.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some reflections on getting into modes late.

As I noted at the beginning of November, there’s a ticking clock on NBA Live 19. With 2025 almost over, we’re getting inching closer and closer to time running out on the final NBA Live release to date. Once the servers are shut down at the end of January, it’ll be a wrap on all modes that require online connectivity. As it is, some of those modes are already inaccessible, or their matchmaking functionality has been disabled. NBA Live 19 Ultimate Team is still playable as of writing – at least on PlayStation 4 – but has lengthy load times as EA Sports gets ready to pull the plug.

For many basketball gamers, the impending shutdown of NBA Live 19’s servers and the lethargic menus in Ultimate Team won’t be a concern. Indeed, it may be a surprise that the game still has online support, limited and declining as it is. It’s something that I’m well aware of though, as I’ve been playing NBA Live 19 quite regularly in recent months, with a keen interest in Ultimate Team after completing The Streets World Tour. Needless to say, I won’t be able to complete everything in the mode before it’s gone forever. That likely would’ve been the case even if I had been playing LUT 19 since launch, but it’s another example of me being late to the party with game modes.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on the dichotomy of shooting mechanics in modern basketball video games.

Over the decades, developers of basketball video games have strived to make their controls and gameplay mechanics deeper and more skill-based. This has of course resulted in hits and misses throughout the years, as some ideas have proven to be better – and more fun – than others. The successful ideas have become staples of the genre, persisting even as other elements of the games are revamped. To that end, just as modern basketball games aren’t about to eschew right stick dribbling controls, it’s difficult to see them shying away from shooting mechanics based on Green Releases.

Once again, there’s a reason that both of those concepts have prevailed as staples of NBA 2K, as well as the last two NBA Live games. Modern dribbling controls offer precision that wasn’t possible by simply tapping a crossover or spin move button, while today’s shooting mechanics avoid the somewhat contrived ambiguity of RNG; well, for the most part, anyway. At the same time, this skill-based approach definitely isn’t perfect either. There’s undoubtedly merit in rewarding gamers for precise timing with a 100% chance of success, but it can be punishingly challenging, not to mention unbalanced and unrealistic. And so, there’s a dichotomy to these shooting mechanics.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five features that we’ve lost, yet for some reason don’t talk about enough.

One of the unfortunate realities of long-running annual sports video games is that over the years, features will be lost. Contrary to popular belief, the code is re-written every year, as it’s necessary to accommodate new features and mechanics. As such, anything that is incompatible or otherwise causes issues with the new code is at risk of ending up on the cutting room floor, particularly if the telemetry data indicates that it isn’t a very popular feature. With that being said, some features are dropped because they’re no longer useful or relevant, or indeed, stand in the way of recurrent revenue.

I’m sure that we can all cite plenty of examples of lost features that we’ve fervently wished were still in NBA 2K, NBA Live, and other games. Indeed, I’ve mentioned some of my own picks in previous articles and on our podcast! However, there are lost features that really should receive more attention than they do, yet people seldom bring them up. To that end, I’m as guilty as anyone else of glossing over some of these lost features that were once staples of basketball video games, so I figured it’s about time that I spotlight a few of them. While some of them may not seem like a big deal, they’re still basic functionality that’s bewilderingly absent in otherwise deep games.

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EA has advised that the NBA Live 19 servers will be shutting down on January 30th, 2026. The game was de-listed from digital storefronts in late October, basically telegraphing that the end of online support was rapidly approaching.

In recent months, gamers have reported problems when trying to play LIVE Events in The One, suggesting that online support has been in the process of wrapping up for a while now. However, Ultimate Team has remained online and fully functional to this day, and I can confirm that a handful of people are still active in the Community Market on PlayStation 4. With that being said, Ultimate Team will definitely be inaccessible once the NBA Live 19 servers are shut down early next year, along with all other online modes. The final roster update will also be unavailable at that time.

With the shutdown of the NBA Live 18 servers last year, it’s no surprise that NBA Live 19 will soon follow suit. EA has been unusually generous in maintaining online support for the eighth gen NBA Live releases, especially compared to the 27 months that Take-Two guarantees for NBA 2K titles. Obviously NBA 2K has been markedly more successful with a majority of gamers moving on every year, but to that end, it’s quite surprising that the less popular NBA Live releases have retained online support for so long. Prior to support ending for NBA Live 18 last year, NBA Live 14 and NBA Live 15 were still online as of 2019, while NBA Live 16’s servers were finally shut down in 2020. As such, the eighth gen NBA Lives have ended up receiving between five and seven years of online support.

However, the time has obviously come for NBA Live 19 to be sunset. For anyone still playing the game – which includes me, thanks to a recent kick – we’ll still have three months to finish up any business with modes featuring online content. The offline modes will naturally still be available, though speaking for myself, it’ll be a shame to lose Ultimate Team. Additionally, if you don’t own the game and want to add it to your collection, at this point you’ll need to track down a physical copy. In any case, if NBA Live 19 is still in your rotation or you’d like to give it another look while it’s still relatively intact, make sure you’re ready to be done with it by January 30th next year!

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on the two camera angles that I prefer to use in basketball video games.

As is the case with just about any fandom, the basketball gaming community has had some silly arguments and engaged in ridiculous gatekeeping. Post a fun highlight clip, and someone is bound to sneer that you must be playing on a lower difficulty level. That may or may not be true, but it’s needlessly judgemental when the point of a clip was to show off a cool animation, not to brag about stick skills. However, nothing compares to the ridiculous gatekeeping and elitism surrounding the choice in camera angles. It truly is the most absurd thing to judge other basketball gamers on!

I find the idea of there only being one “correct” choice in camera angles particularly silly as there are actually two that I primarily use, and a couple of others that I also like. Don’t get me wrong; even if there was only one camera angle for me, I wouldn’t consider others to be incorrect, or a sign of ineptitude and source of shame. For that matter, I don’t think that my preference for multiple camera angles makes me better than anyone, either! Indeed, given that there’s a reason basketball gamers prefer a particular view over other camera angles, my approach is arguably the weird one. However, there’s a reason that my basketball gaming is a tale of two camera angles.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on how online play encourages a mindset of “on to the next one”.

During our discussion of the presentation developer blog for NBA 2K26 in Episode #592 of the NLSC Podcast, we once again broached the idea of 2K bringing back the Pressbook in a future game. While it isn’t absolutely essential for offline gamers who can easily pause to use instant replay and Photo Moments, it’d still be handy to have. It would be even more useful in online play, since it would provide cinematic replays and stills that would otherwise be impossible to capture. While we both like the idea, Dee made a very important point about the mentality of many online gamers.

He pointed out that when it comes to online play, a lot of people take the approach of – to quote a Jay-Z song from the NBA 2K13 soundtrack – on to the next one. In other words, there’s no waiting around to reflect on your last game and to view screenshots and highlights from it, as is often the case in offline gameplay. As someone who did play online for several years, Dee is absolutely right here! Even though I’m still in favour of it returning, there’s no question that the Pressbook might not be very popular with online gamers, despite how fun and useful it could be for content creation. When it’s all about moving on to the next one though, the sentimentality just isn’t there.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with my suggestions on how to fix the connected experiences in MyCAREER.

This is far from the first time that I’ve discussed criticisms of the competitive scene in NBA 2K, specifically the online team play experiences connected to MyCAREER. To that point, I’m going to be treading some familiar ground here today, from grinding to proper matchmaking functionality. That’s because the same issues continue to hold back the connected experiences in MyCAREER, and improvements are well overdue. As popular as the online scene in NBA 2K may be, the quality of the experience lags behind other games, and is nowhere near where it needs to be.

You can see the frustration everywhere. It’s been mentioned in our Forum, over on Operation Sports, on social media, and in numerous threads in the official NBA 2K subreddit. So many gamers see the issues, and apart from the ones who want to shout down all criticism – usually thanks to selfish zero-sum thinking – people want to see the scene improve. The concepts of the connected modes in MyCAREER have the potential to be so much better than they are, and I speak from my own experience when I say that they’ve shown flashes of that brilliance. Until these improvements are made however, the connected experiences in MyCAREER will continue to suffer.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on how “realism” is rapidly becoming a dirty word among basketball gamers.

We all have our own ideas of what makes for a fun basketball video game. Beyond a preference between the sim and arcade styles, we each have a vision of what games in those subgenres should be like. Obviously, sim gamers have traditionally preferred a realistic approach to the virtual hardwood, though opinions will vary as to what that realism should entail. However, when the sim titles were primarily aimed at hardcore basketball fans, there was usually more unity in calls for the games to be as realistic as possible. The notion that realism didn’t matter was certainly an unpopular view.

It’s why Da_Czar’s catchphrase of “don’t play video games; play basketball!” became a creed that resonated with so many simheads, and why there was excitement when he joined the development team at Visual Concepts. After all, if Take-Two was going to hire anyone to help in the continued efforts to strive for realism in their NBA series, Da_Czar was an ideal choice! As NBA 2K’s popularity has grown however, there’s been a noticeable shift in attitude. More and more people are saying “who cares about real basketball, it’s just a game!” Sim gamers are suddenly the ones being labelled as “casuals”, and realism is being treated as a dirty word when talking about sim titles.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five game modes that are sorely missed nowadays.

Being a long-time basketball gamer eventually means missing a feature or an entire game mode that’s disappeared from recent releases. It may have been big and popular, or it might have been small and relatively niche, but either way, you wish that it were still available. There are countless examples that we could all cite, but there are five modes in particular that I believe are sorely missed nowadays. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t had other great modes and features, or that the games haven’t been any good since we lost these modes, but we still hated to see them go.

We must of course acknowledge that there are many reasons why modes we sorely miss were removed, and it’s not always malicious. If a mode wasn’t very popular, or if there was difficulty integrating it with new features, or there’s a solution that’s mostly better but for a couple of differences that appeal to a small contingent of the userbase, it’s going to end up on the chopping block.  If the removal of a mode or feature helps generate recurrent revenue…well, that feels much shadier! Mind you, whatever the reason may be, it still stings to lose modes that we’re fond of. With that in mind, here are five modes that I’d suggest are sorely missed by basketball gamers these days.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some reflections on MyCAREER stories that have gone untold…at least from my perspective.

Not to sound like a broken record, but I’m glad to have escaped the basketball gaming habits that had me in a rut. Although I can still have fun with MyCAREER – as my ongoing game in NBA 2K14 clearly demonstrates – I don’t miss the annual ritual of starting over from scratch with a ridiculously low-rated MyPLAYER. I don’t miss diligently doing every extracurricular activity to maximise my VC earnings so that I don’t have to spend money to speed up the process. I don’t miss weathering an awful grind until MyCAREER is fun, knowing that I’ll have to do it all over again next year.

With that being said, I would’ve liked to have spent a bit more time in MyCAREER in recent years, if only so that I could comment on their stories like I have for previous games. Although I’ve been quite critical of some of the MyCAREER stories, I’ve also greatly enjoyed others, and come to appreciate the concept in general. Of course, what I really miss is the ability to go back and experience the MyCAREER stories in recent NBA 2K games. Now that the mode is no longer available in any form offline, a big chunk of eighth and ninth gen NBA 2K releases isn’t available for retro/throwback gaming. And so for me, these MyCAREER stories will sadly remain untold What Ifs.

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five major problems with open worlds in sports video games.

Since the introduction of The Neighborhood in NBA 2K18, open worlds have been a core part of the MyCAREER experience. Whether an urban complex, a cruise ship, or a beachfront town, they’ve taken MyCAREER and its connected modes from menus to an environment that can be explored. The Neighborhood has since given way to the much larger open world of The City in the flagship version of NBA 2K, although it was condensed slightly in NBA 2K25. Elsewhere, WWE 2K25 now features The Island, and EA Sports are reportedly also looking to bring open worlds to their games.

Now, I have nothing against open worlds in video games. I’m a fan of both the Grand Theft Auto and Fallout series, so I know how much fun the concept can be. However, I don’t believe open worlds belong in sports video games like NBA 2K or WWE 2K. Sure, they can be made to work, facilitating the MMORPG aspects of career modes nowadays. To that point though, I don’t think that it results in a better experience for gamers, particularly anyone who prefers traditional career mode gameplay. With that in mind, here are five big problems that are created when open worlds are forced into sports games, and therefore five reasons why they shouldn’t be a part of those titles!

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