Tag Archives: Ratings

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the time that Stephen Curry was briefly rated 99 Overall in NBA 2K16.

Sunday marked ten years since Stephen Curry was named the first unanimous Most Valuable Player in NBA history. We can certainly debate as to whether he should’ve been the first, as there’s been some questionable MVP voting over the years; even when the “correct” player won the award. However, I’d suggest that even if Curry shouldn’t have been the first, he was nevertheless absolutely deserving of the honour. He had a tremendous season, with both he and the Golden State Warriors breaking records. Of course, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers spoiled the ending!

A month before the Cavaliers’ 3-1 comeback became the story that defined the 2016 season however, Curry and the Warriors were obviously the talk of the league. Their impressive campaign and Curry’s individual brilliance naturally inspired debate about ratings and rankings, which also carried over to the virtual hardwood. In the wake of taking home a second-straight MVP and in unanimous fashion, Stephen Curry was boosted to 99 Overall in the official rosters for NBA 2K16, in an update that came through ten years ago yesterday. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 ways that basketball games fail to properly represent big men on the court.

Although I came to favour creating point guards for my career mode avatars, and my all-time favourite player is a shooting guard, I definitely have an affinity for big men in basketball and basketball video games alike. Back in the 90s, I loved watching the superb post play of Hakeem Olajuwon, the raw power of Shaquille O’Neal, and the spectacular slams of Shawn Kemp. As one of the taller kids who ended up playing centre at school and in my local junior league, those were the players that I tried to emulate in one way or another.

Naturally, whenever I play basketball video games, I want to use those big men like their real life counterparts as well. However, that hasn’t always been possible. From reflecting the advantage that comes with height and size, to accurately depicting skills and play styles, big men often haven’t felt like themselves on the virtual hardwood. In the case of older games, primitive mechanics and AI are frequently to blame, but even newer titles have their issues. Furthermore, misconceptions and stereotypes have also led to big men having wildly inaccurate ratings and other attributes. With that being said, here are five common ways that basketball video games get big men wrong.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at a handful of minor inaccuracies – some of which involve Harold Miner – in NBA Jam TE for PC.

The PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition is one of my all-time favourite basketball video games. It’s actually the first basketball video game that I owned, and I still have my original copy thirty years later. To that end, along with trading cards, it played a part in teaching me about NBA teams and players during the early days of my basketball fandom. Of course, being an arcade title that took liberties with ratings and indeed the importance of certain players, it wasn’t the most accurate introduction across the board!

Obviously I had other, more accurate resources as well, from magazines and books to watching every game and episode of NBA Action that I could. It soon allowed me to identify the inaccuracies in NBA Jam TE PC, though it didn’t diminish my love of the game. In fact, as the years have gone by and I’ve also learned more about video game development, it’s been fascinating to dust off the game and analyse those inaccuracies; especially the ones that appear to be intentional design choices. There are a few that I’d like to discuss today, so let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 memorable roster mod complaints that I’ve received over the years.

One of the annoying things about creative endeavours – especially online content creation – is the way that negative remarks stick in your mind. You can read nine glowingly positive things from people who enjoyed what you did, and one bluntly harsh comment from someone who didn’t, and somehow it’s the latter that sticks in your mind. Even though the takeaway should be that nine out of ten people liked your work, somehow you focus on the fact that one person wasn’t a fan. While negativity bias may have evolutionary importance, it’s not conducive to creative satisfaction!

After all, when you create something that you hope will be enjoyed, it’s dismaying to hear that someone didn’t like it. Of course, when it comes to a project such as a roster mod for a basketball video game, the complaints can feel rather disproportionate. To that point, some feedback is just entertainingly ridiculous, so it’s not necessarily a case of being hurt by what was said. Indeed, even negative comments that stung a little at the time end up being amusing to look back upon! And so, while negativity bias may have helped commit the following roster mod complaints to memory – and some are examples of how not to provide constructive feedback – I can laugh about them now.

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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 challenging it can be to accurately rate a fading star in basketball video games.

Since they became a visible part of basketball video games, player ratings have been a contentious issue. We’ve rarely been completely happy with the ratings in the official rosters, sometimes for very good reasons; particularly when it comes to the historical players! Developers have also shared stories about players arguing about their ratings when they come in for motion capture or face scans. On a lighter note, when Hassan Whiteside returned to the NBA for the 2015 season and began turning in some good performances for the Heat, he joked about doing it to get his NBA 2K ratings up.

As someone who used to maintain current roster updates for NBA Live on PC, there were certainly ratings in the default rosters that I disagreed with. At the same time, I also sympathised with the producers who were responsible for those official rosters, because it’s impossible to please everyone. We all have different views on how certain players should be rated – with bias often being a factor – as well as how player ratings should be handled across the board. All roster makers end up settling on a system of some kind, me included. Even so, some players have proved particularly challenging to rate over the years, and a fading star will generally be among the most difficult.

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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 noteworthy shortcomings with roster editing over the years.

Although comprehensive modding projects generally require external tools to achieve the level of detail we desire, it still helps to have robust in-game roster editing on PC. As for console releases, the in-game customisation functionality is all that we have to work with. In the best case scenario, we can put those functions to good use to create everything from minimalist projects to custom rosters that are surprisingly deep given the lack of custom art files and external modding. Unfortunately, several titles have severely limited what we can create in-game.

Alternatively, some shortcomings don’t stand in the way of creating the project that we envision, but may make roster editing more cumbersome than it should be. If nothing else, there might be some minor inaccuracies that don’t affect the on-court experience, but are nevertheless annoying for those of us who are sticklers for detail. I’ve talked about limitations to roster editing before, such as an inability to assign or edit certain bio data, and those certainly are frustrating shortcomings. However, for this list, I wanted to focus on some roster editing shortcomings that don’t necessarily receive a lot of attention, but have undoubtedly bothered modders over the years.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at NBA Jam Extreme.

I remember the excitement I felt when I saw a promotion for NBA Jam Extreme in a magazine. NBA Jam Tournament Edition had already solidified my love of Jam, so I was naturally keen on the prospect of a new game with updated rosters. The promo used the game’s cover art: a shot of Shawn Kemp soaring to the rim and throwing it down over Hakeem Olajuwon. The Reignman was actually my cousin’s favourite player growing up and thus I’d become a fan of him as well, so making Kemp the face of NBA Jam Extreme gave it some extra coolness right out of the gate.

And then of course, there’s the name itself: NBA Jam Extreme. Back in the 90s, the word EXTREME often implied that something was cool with a capital C (or a capital K, because again, it was the 90s!). In short, twelve-year-old me had ample reason to be hyped for a new NBA Jam game. As it turned out though, I never got to play NBA Jam Extreme back in the day, as I instead moved on to NBA Hangtime. Honestly, I’d have to say that that was for the best! Nevertheless, it was interesting to finally get my hands on NBA Jam Extreme all these years later. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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As you may have seen, the official NBA 2K social media accounts have begun to reveal the ratings of players in NBA 2K26. I’ve admittedly been skipping over the ratings reveals in recent years, but in the spirit of approaching NBA 2K26 with more optimism and enthusiasm, I figured that I’d make them part of our coverage of the preview season this time around.

So far, we know the top ten three-point shooters, midrange shooters, ball handlers, speediest players, stealers, shot blockers, and rookies. There probably won’t be too many surprises in the lists, with Stephen Curry still ranking as the league’s best long-range bomber, Victor Wembanyama standing above everyone in blocks, and first overall pick Cooper Flagg being top of the class.

Read on for all the ratings that have been revealed so far, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, as well as join in the discussion in our NBA 2K26 Forum! MyTEAM news is also coming this week, so stay tuned for my summary of the key points of that Courtside Report. Also be sure to listen to Episode #592 of the NLSC Podcast, where Dee and I covered the Courtside Report on presentation.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #585 of the NLSC Podcast!

As we reach the midway point of 2025, the preview season for NBA 2K26 is suddenly looming on the horizon. With that in mind, what are we hoping to see in the next sim basketball game from 2K Sports? This week, we join the community in discussing our Wishlists for NBA 2K26, beginning with our suggestions for improvements to gameplay, mechanics, and controls, and then moving on to our ideas for modes, features, content, presentation, and other aspects of the game. Although we did feel more positive about NBA 2K25 and remain cautiously optimistic about NBA 2K26, there are definitely some key enhancements and additions that can and should be made in this year’s release!

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:17:12 — 53.4MB)

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!

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m dusting off NBA Live 2004 to see when LeBron James will retire in its Dynasty mode.

As of writing, it seems a safe guess to say that LeBron James will likely play at least one more season. He has an opportunity to set a new record by playing in his 23rd campaign, not to mention add to his career statistics and possibly contend for another championship. It would also give him an opportunity to further mentor his son Bronny and likely play some more minutes side-by-side with him, while also enjoying a full retirement tour. And of course, if by some chance he does decide that the 2025 season was his last, he’s obviously had a long and extremely successful career.

His longevity, while certainly impressive, isn’t altogether surprising. Not only are we seeing more players stick around for 16+ seasons, but LeBron is obviously a superb athlete, and has remained healthy throughout his career. As with other greats who came straight out of high school, it was commonly speculated that LeBron would go on to have a long career, but what did contemporary video games predict? With Dynasty mode in NBA Live 2004 consisting of 25 seasons, the game may still be able to correctly predict when LeBron will retire! Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 erroneous ratings that were based on reputation and narratives, rather than accurate analysis.

Creating roster updates for PC releases of NBA Live for so many years has made me critical of, but also sympathetic to, the producers who maintain official rosters. On one hand, I know the importance of accurately rating players and always strived to do my best in that regard, while also relying on the watchful eyes of the community to provide helpful feedback. To that end, I also understand how easy it is to overlook certain ratings when there are over 400 active players to keep track of. Mistakes will slip through, or a much-needed update will be forgotten.

With that being said, there are times when erroneous ratings aren’t actually a matter of oversight, but rather by design. There are a few reasons for this. As Dee has pointed out, a lack of care with copy and paste jobs, and myopic reliance on spreadsheets and formulas, has led to laughable ratings and tendencies. Other times, these erroneous ratings are reputation-based, as an unsubstantiated narrative about a player is accepted as common knowledge. However, it’s not always a bad thing, as a player’s skill may demand ratings that their stats may not, justifying some padding. These five examples represent the good, the bad, and the lazy, of erroneous reputation-based ratings!

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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 basketball gaming theories that I can’t conclusively prove, but strongly suspect to be true.

Video games have attracted countless theories, rumours, and hoaxes throughout the years. From speculation about secrets to gossip about gameplay mechanics, these stories have spawned myths, legends…and occasionally, actually been correct! Yes, games are often designed to essentially cheat in order to give us a challenge. Yes, sometimes that rumoured hidden content is there (or at least, there’s a remnant of it). And yes, it’s hardly a wild conspiracy theory to suggest that so many modern Triple-A titles are being designed to push gamers towards microtransactions.

Of course, there are the theories that aren’t true: the secret that’s a hoax, the misguided belief as to why something is a certain way, and so on. These are the things that we’re so sure of, or want to believe, but they’ve been proven false. And then, we have the video game theories that we can’t conclusively prove – yet, anyway – but they haven’t necessarily been disproven, and seem quite likely. I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories – philosophical razors tend to make short work of most of them – but I do have a few related to basketball gaming that I am inclined to believe. Well, maybe not conspiracies as such, but they are five basketball gaming theories that I put stock in.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #529 of the NLSC Podcast!

Which stars, past or present, have been harder to use in basketball video games than they should’ve been? This week, we join the community in recalling our most memorable examples of struggling stars on the virtual hardwood, and what made them so difficult to dominate with. We also recap a fun Parsec session of NBA 2K19, in which we used the 1986 roster from the Classic Seasons project. On a less positive note, there’s the dismaying news that NBA 2K24 has been extremely profitable for Take-Two despite the game receiving significant backlash and criticism from the community. Along with some damning remarks from someone who has been involved with the NextMaker program, it doesn’t fill us with hope for future releases.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:27:05 — 60.1MB)

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 the padding and politics involved with player ratings.

Although the discussion has seemingly turned to MyPLAYER builds and figuring out the meta, I’d suggest that real player ratings will always be a point of interest. They’re still vital in accurately representing the players’ abilities and skill levels, and if you play franchise modes or with retro teams, you’ll notice mistakes and inconsistencies. There’s also still an interest in which players are top-rated in key categories such as dunking and three-point shooting, as well as where everyone ranks with their Overall Ratings. Again, it may not be as much of a focus now, but there’s still a discussion.

To that point, it’s clear that personal opinions and politics do play a role in both our view of the ratings, as well as how they’re assigned in the first place. Lest I sound like a grumpy old head grumbling about modern games, let’s make it clear that this has been going on for many, many years! Indeed, I’d suggest that as long as basketball video games have had visible ratings – and in some cases, where there have been some sneaky hidden mechanics – player abilities have been subject to padding and politics. There are times when it’s been fairly benign or even enhanced the experience, but it can certainly be problematic and damaging when it leads to widespread inaccuracies.

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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 weird bugs and design errors that I’ve encountered in the modes of basketball video games.

It bears repeating that no video game, basketball or otherwise, is going to be perfect. If it were possible to design games and software that were completely bug-free, it would’ve happened a long time ago! As basketball games and their modes have become deeper and more sophisticated, the chances of there being a few bugs here and there has only increased. Likewise, while there have been some very smart and passionate people working on basketball video games past and present, not all ideas pan out as well as hoped, leading to what we could reasonably call design errors.

Needless to say, it’s frustrating for everyone when bugs and design errors stand in the way of modes being as fun as they could and should be. In the best case scenario, a patch can fix the problem, or the issue will be resolved in next year’s release at the latest. Sadly that isn’t always the case, and there are times when we’ve been stuck with bugs and design errors for a few games running (and sometimes, even longer). Even when bugs and design errors don’t completely ruin a mode, they still have an impact on the experience, and they become one of the things that we remember most about a title. Here are five weird bugs and design errors that I’ve encountered in modes I play.

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