Tag Archives: Statistics

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 inaccuracies and other issues that have bothered me while basketball gaming.

Even the best basketball video games have had issues and inaccuracies. Perfection is basically an impossible bar to reach, and coding a sophisticated video game of any genre is hardly as simple as typing plain English into a word processor! Also, some ideas simply just don’t pan out. And so, we accept that our favourite hoops titles will have imperfections. In the best case scenario, it doesn’t stop us from enjoying them. Mind you, because we’re passionate about basketball and basketball gaming alike, any major inaccuracies and technical issues are naturally difficult to ignore.

Of course, these issues and inaccuracies don’t always ruin basketball video games. As I said, even our favourite games have them, and we all have different standards and expectations besides. With that being said, while technical problems, inaccuracies, and other issues may not completely spoil a game, they can still end up bothering us. The good ultimately outweighs the bad, but they’re still the finer points that we can’t help but notice, and would like to see fixed and improved upon for an even better experience. To that end, while the following five issues and inaccuracies didn’t stop me from having fun on the virtual hardwood, they were nevertheless a bit annoying!

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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 I’m just as passionate about getting rebounds on the virtual hardwood as I am racking up assists.

I’ve spoken at length about my love of tallying assists in video games. It all began with MyCAREER in NBA 2K13, where my player – a shooting guard – was thrust into the role of starting point guard when Ty Lawson went down for the year with an injury. One of the dynamic goals challenged me to break Fat Lever’s team record for assists in a single game, and that was that. In future games, my MyPLAYER was a point guard, built to get dimes. This carried over into playing online with NLSC THRILLHO, as I relished setting up the guys to score.

However, assists aren’t the only statistical column that I enjoy filling up in basketball video games. I also really relish getting rebounds! There’s something so satisfying about snaring a board, whether I’m controlling all five players or I’m locked to my career mode avatar. Indeed, on the couple of occasions that I’ve created a big man instead of a playmaking point guard, I’ve switched my focus from dropping dimes to cleaning the glass. Mind you, given how averaging a triple-double in MyCAREER becomes a habit when you have the strategy down pat, my point guards grab a lot of boards as well. Whichever game and however I’m playing, I truly do love rebounds.

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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 another list of things that you’ll see in games that are unpatched.

As I noted in my first article recalling things that you’ll see in unpatched games, official updates are a contentious issue. Day 1 patches do little to convince gamers that modern titles aren’t rushed out before they’re ready, and frequent updates can be annoying when they’re several gigabytes in size, essentially forcing you to download the entire game all over again. From the list of issues that they have to fix to some of the undesirable changes that are pushed through, the sight of a pending patch is one that makes many basketball gamers groan in frustration.

However, when we consider that we used to have to beg and plead for patches that barely fixed any issues, and for a long time weren’t viable on console, I’ve come to believe that having too many patches is actually the lesser of two evils. While there are times when foregoing an update or downgrading to a previous version is in fact preferable, you’ll also be reminded of some weird and bothersome issues when you play unpatched games. Of course, you’ll also see some interesting snapshots of the league when a game and its rosters are restored to their vanilla state. With that being said, here are five more noteworthy things that you’ll encounter without patches.

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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 paying tribute to Doug’s Stats, an essential modding resource in the early days of our community.

I’ll admit that sometimes I yearn for the World Wide Web of yesteryear, when fansites were king and before social media became everything. Selfishly, it’s because we didn’t have to compete with platforms backed by billionaires, but beyond that, I miss seeing other websites that have the same passion that we do. At this point, we’ve outlasted a number of our contemporaries, from fellow NBA Live fansites to our former host, GameSpy. Some of those sites have been preserved by archive.org, but many others are sadly gone forever.

Occasionally, someone will drop by the Forum or one of our social media pages to reminisce and express joy that we’re still around. Obviously it’s always nice to receive flattering compliments and read people’s positive memories of the NLSC, but I also relate to it because I too am heartened to discover a site I once used to visit is still around decades later. One of those sites is Doug’s Stats, which as I mentioned, was once an essential roster modding resource in our community. Doug’s work definitely deserves recognition – even to this day – 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 mistakes I’ve made while working on roster mods over the years.

When it comes to modding – no matter what the game or series – it’s absolutely fine to be proud of your work. Unfortunately, this sometimes goes beyond pride and creative satisfaction, and dives straight into egotism. This goes for any mod, but I’ve noticed that roster makers whose work receives acclaim for its accuracy and quality often begin to get a big head. It’s how we come to see a long-time, well-regarded roster maker claim that Al Horford is a better, more skilled player than Hakeem Olajuwon! Seriously, how does that not utterly destroy your credibility?!?

As a roster maker for many years, such egotistical bluster and confident inaccuracy greatly bugs me. I’ve received some kind compliments about my rosters for various NBA Live titles throughout the years, so I’d like to think that I know a thing or two about basketball, the NBA, and modding. However, I’ve strived to remain humble about my work, in part because I value humility, but also because I’m well aware that I’m not infallible. Beyond any issues with ratings and lineups, I’ve made mistakes while planning and assembling roster projects, and failed to fix technical errors before public releases. To that point, here are five mistakes that I’ve made with roster mods.

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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 inaccurate stats can be a real turn-off for those of us who are sim heads.

Even though sim basketball gamers have somehow come to be considered “casuals” by gatekeeping denizens of the competitive online scene, there are still plenty of virtual hoopers who prefer the NBA side of video games. Sim heads are more likely to prefer franchise play and the traditional career mode experience, where a realistic style of play is more viable. Of course, opting for realism across the board is easier said than done. After all, in franchise and career modes, that means playing a full 82-game season on twelve minute quarters, which can be a daunting prospect.

It’s something that I’ve done in multiple games now. In my ongoing NBA 2K14 PS4 MyCAREER, I’m playing on full quarters and have yet to simulate a game as of my sixth season, and it’s been a more rewarding journey as a result. That’s how I feel about all of my games where I’ve played through at least one season from start to finish, but to that point, I can attest to it being a lengthy process. Even if you never feel bored, it can still be challenging to find the necessary free time. This is why the simulation function and shorter quarter length options are so useful, but for hardcore sim gamers, the inaccurate stats they produce can be difficult to get your head around.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #525 of the NLSC Podcast!

Which basketball video games have been the easiest and hardest to put up stats in over the years? This week, we join the community in discussing the titles that stick out in our minds, as well as the statistics that either eluded us or seemingly piled up way too easily. Additionally, following a session with Virtua NBA – an arcade release that a few people in our community have taken an interest in lately – we give our thoughts on what is certainly an intriguing game. We also provide an update on our journey in the original NBA Jam, pick our ideal hoops games for an annual tournament, and reflect on how it feels to shelve a beloved favourite that’s unfortunately grown stale.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:05:25 — 45.3MB)

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 racking up statistics, and keeping track of the virtual numbers we accumulate in basketball video games.

Grumpy Elder Millennial of 39 that I am, I have a love-hate relationship with stats. I dislike how basketball and NBA discourse has been reduced to numbers, often cherry-picked to suit an agenda. Of course, even in my 20s – when I wasn’t quite as old or as grumpy – I disliked the way advanced metrics were beginning to creep into hoops talk. Some of the statistical feats being cited these days are utterly ridiculous: “first player to have 39 points, 17 rebounds, 13 assists, three steals, two blocks, and shoot better than 54%, on a Monday, in a blue jersey”. Just stop!

With that being said, stats are still interesting, and they do factor into analysis of the sport. They’ve always been relevant to some degree, and part of the discussion. Big performances matter, and are fun to watch. After all, if a player scores 50, they’ve clearly hit a lot of shots, potentially on some spectacular plays. The same goes for the numbers we post on the virtual hardwood. Whether we’re controlling NBA players or an avatar in a career mode, most of us enjoy filling the stat sheet. Game-to-game, it keeps things interesting. Over the course of a virtual season, those numbers can be almost as fun to look at as the statistics that star players are tallying in the real NBA.

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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 your turnovers will be inflated in basketball video games.

In an era where stat-padding is encouraged – in real life and on the virtual hardwood – the turnovers column is one that you don’t want to fill. They indicate ballhandling blunders, and only serve to help the other team; especially live ball turnovers! Of course, a perfect game is easier said than done, as mistakes will happen. If you look at some of the best playmakers throughout NBA history, you’ll see that their turnovers are often high. The downside of handling the ball so often is that you will be targeted by master thieves, and you’ll have more passes to be intercepted or mishandled.

Turnovers in sim basketball games generally reflect the ways that players cough up the ball in real life, but the numbers can be inflated. The goal of representing real life mistakes can lead to contrived situations where the ability to keep control of the ball and make smart decisions is taken out of the user’s hands. In the worst case scenario, this leads to losses when the game decides that despite doing everything correctly, the user will commit a costly turnover at an inopportune moment. If nothing else, it will lead to inflated numbers that don’t quite tell the truth about a gamer’s ability to take care of the rock. Here are five ways that your turnovers are bound to be inflated.

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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 tales of mentoring Terry Hanson, and trying to turn him into a star in my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER.

I’ve always enjoyed generated rookies in franchise modes, and later career modes as well. While NBA 2K’s franchise modes have allowed for custom Draft Classes – and this customisation is important to have – I personally prefer fictional players as the years progress. They become Virtual Hardwood Legends in our save files, weaving stories of Hall of Famers, breakout stars, and unfortunate busts. We can do that with actual NBA players too, of course, but generated rookies are a blank slate with no real world comparisons. We can completely indulge our imaginations with them.

Terry Hanson is a generated rookie in Year 3 of my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER, a game that I just can’t get enough of right now. To date, I’ve done all the things that all of us always do in the NBA side of MyCAREER. I’ve set records, averaged a triple-double, and won championships. I’ve levelled up my MyPLAYER, maxing out at 97 Overall, as was the case with some builds in NBA 2K14. I’ve turned my avatar into an All-Star and punched his ticket to Springfield when the time comes to hang it up. Inevitably, if we play NBA MyCAREER long enough, we’ll fulfil a destiny of superstardom that’s at the heart of the story. Now I’m writing a new chapter: making Terry Hanson a star.

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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 specific details that we can’t include in roster mods for various games.

There are a ton of creative things that our community has done with roster mods over the years. Sometimes the games have been conveniently flexible in what can be done with their roster files, while other times we’ve had to devise clever workarounds. For the most part, the community has been very understanding when limitations have stood in the way of 100% accuracy, especially when it comes to retro roster mods. At the same time, it usually requires some disclaimers to be posted. If you go back and look at the readme files for Lutz’s rosters, you’ll see FAQs addressing these concerns.

Unfortunately, there are some details that we just haven’t been able to include in roster mods for NBA Live and NBA 2K. It’s seldom been gamebreaking, but for those of us who strive for as much accuracy and detail as possible, it’s still a bummer. Of course, that’s also because they’re the kind of inaccuracies that invite messages telling us that we’ve “forgotten” to do something, even if the release notes are clear that it can’t be done due to technical limitations. Once again though, a vast majority of mod users do understand the situation after those limitations have been explained. I can think of five specific details that can’t be included in roster mods for one reason or another.

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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 what it’s like when we aim for stats and records on the virtual hardwood.

Not to sound like a grumpy old man or anything, but there’s a big emphasis on stats and records in the NBA these days. That’s not to say they weren’t ever relevant, or something that fans and players alike never cared about. Wilt Chamberlain was very much aware of his stats and records, so this mentality predates the three-point era, let alone the past couple of generations. However, it does seem like everyone is obsessed with numbers these days – including rather obscure statistical achievements – to the point where actually winning games and even championships seems secondary.

It’s interesting how this mentality also applies to basketball gaming. Of course, we’ve long used hoops games to put up crazy numbers, leading to a big night for players in real life to be referred to as a “video game performance”. A handful of video games over the past couple of generations have even challenged us to put up stats and beat NBA records for Trophies and Achievements. The funny thing is that it’s not always easy to post ridiculous numbers on the virtual hardwood, or to replicate the feats of NBA greats and record holders. Also, while it’s fun to try alone, chasing records and stats can be a disastrous approach in online play, coming at the expense of winning.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with a look at what your shot chart says about your style of play on the virtual hardwood.

Well, that’s a trashy, clickbait headline if ever I’ve used one! Then again, is it still a clickbait title if it’s kind of making fun of clickbait and trashy, vapid headlines? Arguably, yes. What if I’m truly intending to run some hopefully thought-provoking experiments and share the results? Probably still a bit cheesy! Anyway, have you ever really looked at your shot chart after a game? If you haven’t, there’s no shame. After all, whether you won or lost, hit a statistical goal, or achieved some measure of progression in a mode, tends to be the more pertinent and interesting information.

And yet, it’s interesting to look at our shot chart. As in a real NBA game, it says a lot about how we shot the ball and ran our offense. To that end, it can provide insights into how we won or lost. In video games, it also illustrates some common gaming habits, the reasons for which are interesting to delve into. I’ll admit that I haven’t made a habit of looking at my shot chart after games in recent years, probably because I’ve been focused on grinding for VC and Badge XP rather than playing a sim style in MyCAREER. However, in the interests of experimenting, exploring theories, and self-reflection, I decided that I’d see what my shot charts look like these days.

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We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Start your week here at the NLSC with a feature that’s dedicated to opinions, commentary, and other fun stuff related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games. This week, I’m tipping things off with a few thoughts on games being designed around playing on short quarters rather than the regulation length of 12 minutes.

Playing on 12 minute quarters rather than shorter settings has been a point of pride for me over the years. Well, pride may be too strong of a word – it’s not really any kind of accomplishment, after all – but I always felt fulfilled when I could play through a full 82 game season with regulation quarter lengths. The downside is that even in my favourite franchise experiences, I usually didn’t play more than a couple of seasons unless I resorted to simulating. As I’ve grown older and gained new responsibilities, I’ve had to make peace with the idea of simming games.

It’s been harder to warm up to the idea of playing on short quarters, though. It just doesn’t feel right; it’s not “sim”. If nothing else, I don’t like that the minutes per game averages for my team don’t line up with the rest of the league. The addition of an accelerated clock in various NBA Live titles over the past generation, as well as the ability to normalise stats in NBA 2K’s franchise modes, has provided a solution here. Of course, in MyCAREER, longer quarters allow for more Badge progress in short order, and there’s no normalisation option for stats. Caring too much about that does seem like folly however, as it feels like games are designed for short quarters.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five lists five ways that the CPU will mess with us in basketball video games.

As we all know, multiplayer gaming has its ups and downs. Whether it’s the pain of getting less than ideal teammates online, the frustration of encountering cheesers who spam exploits, or dealing with that one friend who takes things too far messing with you while you’re sitting on the same couch, there are times when you’d prefer to be enjoying single player gameplay. Of course, the single player/offline experience isn’t immune to such chicanery, as games will pull some dirty tricks in order to prevent you from beating them. CPU opponents in basketball games are no different.

To some extent, this is a necessary evil. As far as basketball games have come, they still have limitations. Gameplay is now more realistic with CPU opponents that are bolstered by AI that is smarter, but it still can’t match the creativity and cleverness of a human brain. Tilting a few aspects of the game in the CPU’s favour and including comeback mechanics allows it to be competitive and challenging, though can feel like artificial difficulty. There are also moments that are more benign and don’t necessarily stand in the way of winning, but nevertheless feel like the CPU is messing with us. Here are five examples of the CPU thumbing its nose at us on the virtual hardwood.

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