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MagusofStars posted:Not to this extent though. He's a perennial MVP candidate and future first-ballot Hall of Famer in his prime. Dudes like that very rarely miss the playoffs in consecutive years, never mind for a half-decade straight, even if the surrounding team is subpar. Maybe the team won't amount to anything in the playoffs, but having a player this good and not even being able to squeeze out "being in the top 50% of teams" is just completely unprecedented. I would cite Mitch Richmond on those awful Kings teams in the 90s (they only went to the playoffs once, in '96, and it was with a losing record) as precedent, but I'm not going to belabour the point since he wasn't a perennial MVP candidate largely due to being on bad teams (see how that works?) - at least he made the Hall. That's real life, though, and in real life I would refuse to believe that it's 'just the coaching'. This, though, is a video game and who the gently caress knows what kind of logic lurks in those 1s and 0s.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:54
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Just a heads up that this weekend I'll be roaming the state and visiting some friends of mine now that everyone is vaccinated and also in the state. Playoffs involve me watching actual games so odds of me updating before next week feel slim.
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Jul 2, 2021 00:49
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What a ride. The AI is inexplicably stupid in this game, which I mean does mirror some GMs in the league. Certainly, lazy programming, but just call it an alternate universe where Billy King has had a prodigious number of sons. Looking forward to the next update. I love the NBA and the fake NBA is sating my need for the Finals to start. (Though the sixers aren't in it. Though Ben Simmons will never live up to Ben Simmons in this sim). Probably would've stuck with Torres, but can't argue with the results.
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Jul 5, 2021 05:24
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Thanks for the patience on that. I have screens and should have an update sometime this weekend, likely. For now, I have the continued gripe of "How the gently caress does 2k still, still have the AI interact with screens precisely backward from how players do and they have been making these games for over twenty years?" How do you make a game for over 20 years and make the same mistake literally every year? How is that mistake one of the most fundamental parts of basketball?
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Jul 10, 2021 05:02
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Chapter 27: 2042-2043 Part 4: Playoffs Thanks to all for being patient this week. Got to see some friends for the first time in about two years. Was a lovely time. Playoff updates are also larger than normal updates, assuming we go deep. (Spoilers?) Anyhow, where were we?  Oh, right. Sitting pretty.      It's a bloodbath going into the playoffs. The 76ers are missing their second and third best players and their best player is playing injured. They're also missing their sixth man for at least a few games for good measure. Absolute heartbreak for Dixon that Vaughn was exactly what was needed to get him to the playoffs but then his body crapped out on him just at the finish line. The three words most often said in Atlanta in this week are a tie between "Day to Day" and "Questionable Gametime Decision". If there's a team that could lose in the playoffs to that dinged-up 76ers squad, it's the Hawks without Radu. Utah's missing some huge pieces. Both those guys give them a lot of points and I think Abe Jordan is the only guy on their team that actually plays Center. Or the only one that they'll trust in the playoffs. They actually look to start 6'9 Bruno Jukic there for their series against the Thunder. The poor Kings are without their best defender and their best scorer. The Lakers will miss a few games from the guy they desperately traded some of their future to get back. Looking better and better for the Honu.  First we gotta get through these guys. I've already talked about former Honu player Teddy Vaughn and why he sucks many times during this thread, most recently in the Litany of Curses Update which you should really read. I'm proud of some of those insults. As for the rest of the Rockets, Dion Peterson does nothing but rebound, which is a weird fit next to Vaughn, who also rebounds a lot, but he somehow still manages to get close to 15 a game. I'm underselling him a little, he's actually a low post threat. Wish 2k would fix OVR, because he's better at 77 than a lot of higher rated centers who the AI would give minutes to, that's for goddamn sure. JP Reece is somehow a one-time all-star and has traditionally absolutely torched me in the playoffs when he played for San Antonio. Him and Grant Reece were guys I actually had to game-plan around. Gordon Byrd is a score-first point guard that's fairly effective while Vaughn is out there deciding he should run the offense, like a nit. Alonzo Patton is the single worst starter in the NBA. Maybe the worst all-around player. Anyhow, where the Rockets are actually dangerous is their bench, which I've shown in the Litany of Curses update. Their bench is entirely point guards and power forwards, but they're all ridiculously good. The Power Forwards have the size and length to play center, and Boyd Slaughter, (remember, who was a former #1 pick that is just.... disrespected by the game and league at large) at 6'11 can very comfortably play Small Forward with his agility. It's crazy to me that his RFA wasn't picked up in New Orleans, that the Sonics didn't keep him, and that Houston considers him their third string power forward. 2k's version of OVR is worse every time I see it. I have done over 100 updates on this thread and I find core mechanics worse every time. It's unreal.(Note: The Sonics missed the playoffs. What was the main piece missing from their team? Oh yeah. Boyd Slaughter.) Any mention of the Rockets' bench would be incomplete without mentioning that they give a lot of minutes to former two time MVP Randy Butler. The Rockets are a really weird mirror universe team in that their starters are kind of rear end, but their bench hauled them to the playoffs despite their best efforts to be irrelevant.  I just think everyone should take a minute to appreciate this picture. What a long, strange road it's been. I like to think these two have become great friends. Skipping ahead to the Staff Signing Window, I re-upped Bol. Coach Doncic was quoted as saying "There is no man alive who keeps a clearer head in important games than Bol Bol." when asked if he would bring on his own staff to assist him. Well, he would know.  The Rockets' Coach is also pretty interesting. Hey, Chris, remember that time you played for the Rockets and their magnificently stupid owner said that you had the worst contract in the entire NBA and traded you to the Thunder who you and Gallo took to the playoffs with almost no help, and then they traded you to the Suns who you led to their first ever championship? No? Probably because it happened (or will happen) in an alternate universe. But hey, now you're their coach. I have to, have to have to believe that somehow Fertitta is still the owner of this team. And that he believes the Teddy Vaughn contract is normal and OK, but sticks to his guns about Chris Paul. I need this.  All of my in-game pictures showing off newer players are from this Honu/Rockets series. I gotta admit, toward the end of the playoffs I started getting dangerously angry about how bad 2k is. I mentioned it yesterday, but how the gently caress does a franchise that's 20 years old manage to make it, for twenty years that when an AI player calls for a screen and gets a screen, they almost always run in the direction of the screened player instead of the screening player. HOW?! This is the most basic goddamn thing. Anyhow, this picture is of Clay Calloway, our wave of the future. One of the things he has going for him is he's big and strong for his position. The other guy in this picture, Barry Ware, is only 5'9, so he's really small by NBA standards, but Calloway looked pretty huge next to Vitaly Kozlov, too, and he's 6'2. Calloway reminds me a bit of Deron Williams. Another young player that I want to talk about is Cam Flores. I have determined from this year's playoffs that Cam Flores rules and I love him.  Look at the goofy way this dude shoots free-throws. A still image does it no justice. He starts low and pendulums his arms up to that position and then shoots somewhat normally instead of just catapulting it. Cam Flores has the Bill Cartwright free throw animation. Amazing. I mentioned in other posts that Cam Flores was a quiet player---well, he doesn't have an ego. And I get most of my data from stats and not watching these games (because I'd die. I would literally. Die.) His stats, compared to the rest of the team, are quiet. He mostly contributes defense and solid decision making. But after watching a few games, I realized he's really exciting to watch, and has a high-octane motor and crazy athleticism.  Case in point. Sonnet is frustrated he didn't get a foul call on this missed layup. But check out Cam pointing at the ball. It's all right. He's got this.  Cam.  Has.  Got.  This.  That dunk? On a putback?! In the playoffs?  Wingate has his own little reverse-putback in the same game. Ironically on a missed Flores shot. Much less impressive, but a lot of speed shown here. Still a very good dunk.  Our guys are ready for the playoffs. Getting 22 rebounds in a game with Teddy Vaughn and Dion Peterson starting for the other team is nuts. Anyhow, all my talk probably made the Rockets sound weak and like someone we'd roll over. They actually won two games.  Sometimes this JP Reece guy will just do that. The other game they won was the one where they played Randy Butler for more than 10 minutes. Which might be related. Reece is legit, and their bench is crazy good, even if it is all in on two positions.  Here's the last game. Fred, my guy. I love the effort, but take it easy. Whatever you're doing to get 14 free throws is probably how your legs look like a pair of bananas someone threw down the stairs. The Warriors get a six-game victory over the Spurs despite a herculean effort from Terrell Petersen. Somehow, someway the young kids on the Kings pull the Lakers to 7 games, but just can't hang overcome a real contender. This was a gutsy performance from a squad that had no business winning one game, let alone three. The real shock though, came in the 1/8 series, where going into the series, Utah's owner made some comments to the media about not being afraid of some washed up volume shooter and his backup. And Jesse Harrington took that personally. At 36 years old, across the series, Harrington poured in 30 three point field goals against what was supposed to be one of the best defenses the league has seen in 40 years. I haven't seen that kind of devastation from a prehistoric nightmare since the first time I fought Lavos in the Ocean Palace. Destruction rains from the heavens. Thunder pull off an all time upset in 6 games. Over Yonder East, the Heat make quick work of the Hornets, but lose Eugene Fisher for the playoffs in the process. The Hawks and 76ers put on a fun but ugly 6 game series where the Hawks come back after being down 2-0. Radu actually played both games but was clearly still hobbled. He wouldn't really Radu anyone until the last game, but hey, that's the one that matters. Young Milos Novak briefly forgot the K in his name and fought 7 games with the heavily favored Raptors, but to no avail. Toronto eventually eeking that one out. Indiana's depth closes out the Cavs in a great 7 game series that the Cavs probably lost from injury. Weirdly, not to any of their big name players for once, but to their usually rock-solid bench rotational duo, the Balestrieri Brothers out of Italy. Man, 2k naming, like everything 2k does, is trash.  Well, Jimmie Rodgers aside, this is a nasty little team we've faced a few times, getting better with age. Just all around output from top to bottom. Jimmie Rodgers actually is probably their weak link, in a rare case of OVR being somewhat accurate. Wonder what happened to Rex Fox. One thing I notice right away is that Max Steele is starting. I'm pretty sure Ian Eriksson is their best player. Do they actually have him coming off the bench?  Ah, ok. Both Fox and Eriksson are injured. This could be big for us. Aaaaaaand we promptly lose game 1. One thing I learn watching the Warriors is that they play mean. This is a brutally physical team Keefe, Steele, Neal, and Snow are all willing to toss a guy around the court and definitely get their money's worth when they foul, which has got to be more often than they're called for it  . To make matters worse, Keefe is a terrifying scorer and Reeves does not have the size to properly cover him. Now, if Eriksson wasn't injured, I'd slide Flores, our best defender, over to Keefe and let Reeves try to deal with Eriksson who is a more finesse-focused player. Unfortunately, if I try put a shooting guard against Steele, I'm gonna have a really bad day. Going into this series, Reeves is already getting kinda spongy. I didn't even know you could have two injuries at once. The injury report only displays the longer of the two. So yeah. The Warriors are a bunch of big mean bullies (Hell, I've played Rex Fox a bunch, and I happen to know he's kind of a bully, too) What I need is an enforcer.  It just so happens that I actually drafted one of those this season! I drop Paxson from the rotation for the Warriors series and add in Garrett. In his first game he plays quite well. Getting a three, two free throws, two rebounds and three assists. Really seizing the moment.  But I feel like the box +/- tells the real story about his immediate impact on this series. Yeah, that's right. Just a little more reluctant to shove my guys around now, are you? Of course, two games of playing Warrior ball takes Reeves from "technically injured" to "Actually injured".  Hey, at least he got over his bruised right shoulder. At some point during this series, I got an alert saying Reeves was ready to play again, but it turns out it just meant that his bruised hip returned to the normal color. rear end in a top hat game.  Take two. Joy of joys, they have Rex Fox back now, too. I'll say this, though. The problem I had about not being able to slide Reeves to covering SF to get around Keefe's size and strength is weirdly mitigated by Viana being quite tall himself. Neither Eriksson being injured nor Reeves being injured is a positive for either team, but the two injuries did create this fascinating dynamic.  Viana has no problem stepping into a starting role. Even if he's been on the Reserve list and not even suiting up for games. Viana is one of the biggest condemnations for how bad OVR is and how much it hurts the game and simulation by simply existing in the first place. Viana should be getting minutes, but I'm not about to manually insert him into the game a couple dozen times a season. That's way too much work. Like Dylan Windler before him, Viana is secretly one of our best guys, even though he plays some of the least minutes. I really, truly have grown to hate 2k over the course of this thread. God drat it 2k. GET RID OF OVR. Somehow, we're the last team to reach the conference finals. The Lakers pay extra attention to Jesse Harrington and have one of the all-time best defenders of Giovenco Paciani covering him for most of the series. And the Lakers are way too good for the rest of the Thunder to handle. Thank you for your service in getting rid of the Jazz, but this was a clean sweep. Radu is back to 100% just in time to face a team that's missing one of its two best players, and oh would you look at the time, it's time to drop a couple of 45 point games. Series mercifully only goes 5 games. I can't imagine too many people will want to spend more than 2 days in Miami in the middle of Summer in 2043. Call it a hunch. The Raptors crush the Pacers in 5 games by virtue of being like the Pacers, but fundamentally better at nearly every position.  Hey, remember when JustJeff88 asked me about what teams I thought would win the championship, and I listed four of them? Well, there are two teams I really should have mentioned as serious contenders, but I forgot one existed and I didn't closely look at the roster of the other one. Anyhow, the Lakers are the one I forgot existed. The Lakers are terrifying. Four of the five starters on this team have been All-Stars, and the fifth one, Cody Lowe, is almost certainly going to be an All-Star sooner rather than later. Their bench has gotten a bit worse, but they still have Vitor Vitti as an extremely solid backup. He's just way more effective in that role than he was as a starter. Especially with Reeves out for at least the start of the series, this looks grim. As good as we are, the only matchup among the starting five I feel confident saying we cleanly win is the Barber/Morrison matchup. Also, when I say that, I'm not comparing Craig Curry to Rubens Viana, I'm comparing Craig Curry to Frederick Reeves.  The good news is that our two biggest stars both have the power to elevate their games when they need to.  This is further cemented in a pivotal game 4, where the Honu tie up a series after being down 2-1. This game seemed to break the spirit of the Lakers, and we find ourselves in the finals after six games.  Our opponent is the Toronto Raptors, who got here after a 7 game series against the Hawks. I really wanted my chance to get revenge on the Hawks who beat me in the finals a few years back. Anyhow, the Raptors would be the legitimate champion contenders that I didn't think of because I didn't closely look at their roster. The Raptors are not here by mistake. Lambros Giannou is one of the best floor generals in the league and has developed his shooting touch from where it was---his career to date looks like the second coming of Gheorghe Filimon. Matyas Garay is a motherfucker, and is just way better at both scoring and defense than his OVR would lead me to believe. Usually when OVR is that badly wrong (which is often) it's in one of the two directions. Not both. Florin Eminescu, a two-way volume gunner we faced in the finals last year when he was on the Bucks, and seemingly wants to take revenge. Everett Solomon is a former All Star and NBA Champion. (with the Spurs) who scores well in the post and plays mean defense. Gilbert Swift is a 5 time all-star, former all-league player, and I want to say has made an all-defense team before too. Off the bench they have a former champion (with the Hawks) in Andre Person, and Roberto Cortez, who absolutely poo poo-housed me the year he was on the Ravens. They also have a 99 hustle backup Power Forward named Fabricio Nunnally that I grew to hate with the fury of a hundred million suns, P.J. Foote who gets every rebound, and are rounded out with Donte Aldridge yet another key rotation guy on a former champion (this time, the Cavs.) This is a gorgeously constructed team. Excellent from top to bottom, full of stars, role-players, specialists, and most of them have either gotten to the finals or have actually won. They looked dominant at times in game 1.  In game 2, things are less close. I like that every so often Reeves decides he can't be guarded. That really saves me some hassle. Andersen has one of his better playoff games here, too, and was just lights out.  Raptors laughed us out of the next two, but the ever important game 5 is ours thanks to most of our guys doing what they can. That fourth quarter rally was about as well timed as possible. I kept having to step away from this one. Dealing with the Raptors was incredibly frustrating. So far, every game in the series has gone to the home team. And that trend continued.  As our coach goes to congratulates Garay on truly being a motherfucker, game gotta recognize game and all, you may note that that's our color confetti.   I miss the "everyone sitting in the stands" pictures. Remember those? What happened to those? Badly pictured: The 2043 NBA Champion Honolulu Honu Left to Right Clay Calloway's hands, the left side of Clayton Wingate, suspiciously already drunk Alain Sonnet, game 7 scoring leader B.J. Lawrence (HOW?!), Cam Flores, The Human Contusion: Frederick Reeves, Freddy Tiggs being shy, Hugh Anderson's eye, just the eye, watching you, Hugh Morrison.  I'mma level with you: Until I saw Sonnet with the trophy, I had no idea who was gonna be Finals MVP. Putting it bluntly, we probably had no business winning the championship here. We won almost entirely off of the strength of our bench. All five of our starters had a negative +/- for the series after the first 6 games. We won this one by the absolute skin of our teeth, and I'm still not entirely certain how.  Sonnet I guess was closest to his usual production? He got more steals than usual and helped disrupt Giannou. But this is something like 6 less points and one less assist than his regular season self.  Weirdly, this year I got two of these spraying champaign images, but I didn't take the other one because it didn't have the player (Freddy Tiggs)'s head in the frame at all. I wonder who they're spraying down.  Dunk of the year champion 2043 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Whew. Player retirements come around and immediately piss me off. I suspected we would see one, maybe even two former Honu players inducted into the Hall of Fame. Instead, we got bupkis. I'm somewhat stunned.  The players I was thinking of were Craig Payton and Donta Greene. Beasley was also briefly on the Honu, but was only a 1 time all star.  Payton's resume of 6 all-star appearances and 5 all-league appearances is probably about even with Tim Hardaway's resume of 5 all-star appearances and 6 all-league appearances. Hardaway doesn't have the Championship or the Rookie of the Year award though. If we're only looking at NBA Accolades, Hardaway probably has the best resume of any player not currently in the hall, and it's probably a matter of time before he gets in. Either him or Larry Foust. 2k doesn't care about "time to get in", it either puts you in the hall or it doesn't. Payton missing is the biggest snub I've seen yet.  Or it would be if Donta Greene didn't exist. 5 All-Star Appearances, 6-All League to match Hardaway, but with a whopping 3 championships. This one makes me furious. What the gently caress is 2k's hall of fame requirement if that resume isn't enough? How does 2k gently caress everything up? These two went to college together, spent time in the league together, and deserve to be in the Hall together.  To add insult to injury, neither the Clippers nor the Mavericks retire Payton's number. At least Greene was basically a journeyman. At least the game retired Cortez's number for the Nuggets. I have to think even this only happened because I manually added him to something like 3 all star games, as though averaging close to 20 and 10 for thirteen years with the same loving team somehow isn't good enough.  Other big names are Zagorac and Silverstre, a couple of the better point guards that came from Europe, which is currently known for their shooting guards.  Former Honu Stewart Thornton also retired. Before the playoffs, I briefly considered waiving Karl Cameron and signing him just in case Reeves got injured. And Reeves did get injured, but I was right to assume Viana would be fine.  Possibly the most impactful retirement is that of our team's physical trainer. Egads. We already have had a rough go of it with injuries. The best available trainer in Free Agency is an A- with a lot of interest from other teams, and I wind up overpaying him by about 150,000 dollars to make sure he comes to Hawaii. For once, I'm the one doing the poaching, and it feels good.  Speaking of staff signing, our former coach is once again listed as a Head Coach instead of an assistant GM or assistant Coach, and is hired to another team after just one year. I'm the only reason the AI considers him a coach in the first place. Even though he's a really good coach (and is almost certainly going to develop into an even better one)  I also save the Jazz from committing ritual suicide. I know you got embarrassed in one of the most horribly unexpected upsets of all time, but Jared? JARED? OK, this is ridiculous. This is every single year. I counted who is currently available for coaching positions. There are one hundred fifty six eligible coaches. Somehow, the guy I edited to have no coaching ability whatsoever is able to find a team to sign him to a HEAD coach position every. Single. Year. What the gently caress is broken about the staff signings in 2k? I can't even guess. ALSO, I haven't been taking pictures of it, but seemingly without fail for close to two decades, the Minnesota Timberwolves have fired John Beilein somewhere during the regular season, only to re-hire him in the same off-season. In a game that's broken..... everywhere, where nothing works, not even the gameplay parts, staff signing might be the most broken thing. Either that, or the "artificial limit of 3 overseas players is functionally a limit of exactly one overseas player, and only if you don't have one coming over in the same year". One of those. This game made over a billion dollars.  As if the AI wasn't bad enough, the league votes in overwhelming fashion to  get rid of the Stepien Rule . Unreal.EDIT: Also, nice grammar. First team I notice actually getting bodied by Stepien trades is going to become the El Paso Peppers.  Finally, the draft order is decided. The Neon and Sonics continue their excellent lottery luck by each advancing several spaces, and the #1 overall pick gets the pleasure of having their career forever derailed by the incompetency of the Portland Trailblazer Coaching Staff.  Voting Time The Honolulu Honu have the 34th and.... god it'd be the 61st, wouldn't it? picks in the NBA Draft. As you've seen, we're pretty complete. Additionally, Finnish point guard Rasmus Maki will be available to suit up next year. A)Trade out of the draft entirely, search for future picks (possibly from Stepien Stupidity) B)Shop Paxson or Maki and the pick to move up for a better quality Shooting Guard C)Shop Paxson and Maki and the pick to move up for a better quality Shooting Guard D)Draft some kind of stash player E)Don't overthink things; just draft a good-looking shooting guard I regret to inform you that we have no possibility whatsoever to draft the best name available, and as such there will be no vote on it. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jul 11, 2021 |
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Jul 11, 2021 02:55
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I have a modest request going forward... can you post the results of all playoff games? I get very confused. I thought that you said that the home team one every game in the finals, but the Honu won without having home court since Toronto was a #1 seed and the Honu only #3. Secondly, I think that you should look for future steal picks. This team wants for nothing. Finally, this might be the first hatefuck LP I have ever read. That's not a complaint.
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Jul 11, 2021 04:13
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JustJeff88 posted:I have a modest request going forward... can you post the results of all playoff games? I get very confused. I thought that you said that the home team one every game in the finals, but the Honu won without having home court since Toronto was a #1 seed and the Honu only #3. Unlike the rest of the playoffs, In The NBA Finals, home court advantage is always determined by regular season record, regardless of seeding. Ourselves, Miami, and Toronto all had 53-29 records, but we held tie-breakers against both of them. Weirdly, the game listed Miami as the top of the conference on the standings, but behind Toronto on the Table, so I have no idea what was going on with their seeding, or if it was accurate, but we had the rights to home court advantage over the entire Eastern Conference. (And so would Utah and Golden State) EDIT I just realized how weird this could have gotten. If Utah won, we could have played as the away team in two consecutive series only to be the home team in the finals against a higher seed. As it stands, we only played as the away team in the second round to the Warriors. EDIT 2 Thank you for not kinkshaming me. EDIT 3 I haven't been including most playoff games because most of them aren't actually that interesting, but if there's demand for it, It's not a huge amount of extra effort. What say everyone else? (This would be to include all Honu games. Capturing every playoff game for everyone would spill over into "actually way too much effort" territory.) Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jul 11, 2021 |
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Jul 11, 2021 04:38
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Veryslightlymad posted:Unlike the rest of the playoffs, In The NBA Finals, home court advantage is always determined by regular season record, regardless of seeding. Ourselves, Miami, and Toronto all had 53-29 records, but we held tie-breakers against both of them. Weirdly, the game listed Miami as the top of the conference on the standings, but behind Toronto on the Table, so I have no idea what was going on with their seeding, or if it was accurate, but we had the rights to home court advantage over the entire Eastern Conference. (And so would Utah and Golden State) I stand corrected on the home court issue. I think that I was using MLB or NHL logic. As for the scores, I just want the final score with the stat table and maybe a sentence that says 'We beat the so-and-so to win game #4. This tied the series at 2-2'
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Jul 11, 2021 04:55
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Even easier. Yeah, I'll try to remember.
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Jul 11, 2021 04:56
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I actually think the AI GM's are (unintentionally) on to something here with the Stepien rule. Let's go back and discuss the history, then look at the modern NBA of the 2020's (or future of the 2040's, whatever). The rule was created to keep teams from massively screwing themselves way into the future by trading away endless future picks. The rule was created in the early 1980's after the Cavaliers owner, Ted Stepien, traded away six future first round draft picks from 1982 to 1986 in a failed push for the 1981 playoffs. The players actually selected by those picks ended up being James Worthy, Derek Harper, Sam Perkins, Detlef Schrempf, Roy Tarpley, and Dennis Rodman which is a serious contender all on its' own even before we play the "well, they could instead have picked..." game which includes names like Barkley and Drexler. It's also worth noting that free agency didn't exist, so if you wanted to improve your team, you either had to do it via the draft or trades...but wait, the Cavs have no draft picks and suck enough they don't have any desirable players to trade either, so the Cavs were stuck with no real means of improving except riding out years of failures. Stepien was also a wildly unpopular owner in Cleveland for other reasons, then wanted to sell the team in 1982 due to financial troubles and cratering attendance. But with the team being awful in the present and having no means of improving, nobody wanted to make an offer, especially not at a fair market price. Other owners were terrified that the Cavs would either get sold for way below market value and/or straight up fold. Either outcome would be disastrous for a sport that had seen the entire ABA fold a few years before and didn't even have the pull to get Finals games televised live. So as an enticement to buyers, the league guaranteed the owners would get extra draft picks in the next few drafts, including the #1 overall pick in 1986. The league also instituted the Stepien rule, barring teams from trading first round draft picks, with the intent that wouldn't have the same situation recur. The enticement worked, with the Cavs being bought in 1983 for a reasonable price and the restocked draft picks helping turn the late 80's/early 90's Cavs into a reliable playoff team, albeit one that's forgotten because they kept running into Michael Jordan. So that's the history. But does any of that actually apply to the modern NBA? I don't think so. Free agency exists to give even bad teams the ability to import legitimate NBA players. From a draft perspective, NBA teams value draft picks a lot higher than they used to and rarely trade unprotected draft picks unless they're getting back a true superstar. As for the financial drivers that were the real push for the deal, the NBA is in zero financial danger of folding and even bad teams can easily sell for several hundred million (or more) because people have recognized it's a profitable business model even if your team sucks. And if your team cannot be financially profitable in the current market, there's enough other markets that you could relocate the franchise easily.
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Jul 11, 2021 15:01
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Also, just to separate out my vote from the long infopost / discussion: A)Trade out of the draft entirely, search for future picks (possibly from Stepien Stupidity) The team as constructed is deep enough that I'm not sure there's much real space to play a rookie. Trading for future picks is basically rolling over the asset to a future date when you might be more in need of either immediate help via trade and/or some reinforcements from the draft.
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Jul 11, 2021 15:07
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A)Trade out of the draft entirely, search for future picks (possibly from Stepien Stupidity) If they serve us up such an opportunity, let's pounce and build a true dynasty.
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Jul 11, 2021 23:34
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Chapter 28: 2043-2043 Part 1: Draft and Free Agency Another consensus #1 pick. Portland could use a guy like this.  Nifty little trade here. And it goes back to reinforcing my belief that specifically the in-draft AI is the only sensible AI in the entire game. The brief, flashing moment every year where it more-or-less isn't stupid. Two teams with back-to-back picks swap a Small Forward and a Point Guard  And then draft a Small Forward....  ...And a point guard that each think suits them better than the players they had. Just a very logical, easy to understand and realistic trade.  The Bulls also part with a couple of future picks to acquire this guy, which is another success for the AI. Garrett here actually had the best potential in this draft. (And my team completely whiffed on spotting it.)  Robin Hood Here's why I couldn't possibly win the name game this year. I have had to rename an increasingly high number of players every year, but good ol' Robin Hood is 100% 2k procedurally generated goodness.  We manage to flip our first for a future first and a second. (Phoenix is essentially trading a future first round pick to move up three spots in this year's draft. Well done, AI.) The new second round pick is also in this draft, but that's OK. Now I have two seconds. Someone's gotta like more than one player in this draft, right?  Bingo. That's settled then. Those should give us an injection of new talent right around the time the wheel's start popping off, hopefully.  Mr. Irrelevant 2043 is the fifth player this year (and second back-to-back player) drafted from Duke. (gently caress Duke) On to Free Agency! Honolulu's free agency period is pretty quick.  (Not pictured: Also accepting the option on Rubens Viana's contract) Well, that was simple. Oh, I Guess I had a couple other decisions.  Our rotation is pretty set, and neither of these guys looked better than using Paxson out of position, honestly.  You have got to be kidding me, 2k AI. Again?! This guy was a productive member on your team. He was an RFA. The only thing stopping you from keeping him was yourself, and the AI given to you by your piss-for-cerebral-fluid, Skip Bayless level stupid creators.  At least the Warriors got Eriksson back and added an All-Star. Let's just hope Steele didn't go to a recently good rival.  God drat it.  Batista, who went to the Warriors, was one of the good players on the Bulls, and the other standout player, Sam Drew, finds himself running the offense for the Pelicans now.  The Wizards pick up Fabricio Nunally, who you may have recall, is a real motherfucker. He's now considered the best player on their team, and Louie Morgan is still around being productive, so the Wizards have some dark horse energy going.  After letting him get away from them once, the Lakers are keen to not make the same mistake again with Sebastian Barber.  The Nuggets steal one of the good power forwards from Houston, and also add a very capable likely sixth man in Ariza.  The other good one goes to Milwaukee. The AI does this thing where really good players will bounce around for a couple of years on ultra-bargain deals before someone finally locks them up long term. This would be sort of realistic if it happened about a third as often as it actually does. Unfortunately, for the Bucks, they couldn't convince Jackie Dudley to stay, so as good as Slaughter is, this likely spells an end to their dominant position in the East. Where did Dudley go?  Oooh. Interesting. As long as Zach Cooper is around, this is probably a title contender.  For gently caress's sake. Wait, didn't you have Sam Gooden? That's a marginal upgrade. What happened to him?  Oh, OK. The Heat have him now. Well.... hmm. I dunno how I feel about this. The Heat didn't re-sign Brett Andersen, who has worked his way up from "Mr. Irrelevant" to "fringe MVP candidate". On the other hand Gooden and Eugene Fisher are probably more balanced than running two shooting guards as their best players, like they were doing when they had Andersen and Fisher. This is probably fine for Miami. As for Andersen, well, here's hoping he went to a team that will properly showcase his elite talents.  OH COME ON. All right, Portland, you have two MVP candidates and the consensus #1 pick in the draft. Can you gently caress it up?  "Witness."  Power Rankings feel friendly to us. The 2k Ranking board has us as first, which probably means we're officially the historical best franchise, because 2k seems to put the Lakers and the Celtics at the top every year regardless of how well they've actually played. There's something very on the nose about one thing in 2k that actually supposedly represents 2k itself always takes the most stupid and also most star-loving position possible. I'd say it's nearly self-aware, but they're probably being unironic. "The Celtics won more championships than anybody. Clearly this pattern will hold forever, right guys?"  What the hell? Is that... Is that a tweet specifically because it's now 2043? Of all the things to put detail into.... I need to lie down. Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 02:22 on Jul 16, 2021 |
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Jul 16, 2021 02:19
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I just love the sensible AI during the draft immediately followed by the Max Steele thing. 
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Jul 16, 2021 12:14
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That Bulls/Sonics trade is fantastic, because that is the sort of draft deal that happens all the time in the real NBA - Team A wants to upgrade at a position, but they need to unload their current player to do so, so they agree to swap with Team B, who is thinking "Team A is misusing this guy / he's a poor fit there but would work for us / whatever". In a lot of cases this tends to end up as a true win/win scenario where both teams end up reasonably happy with the trade. Renouncing an RFA is straight up insane though. The whole point of having an RFA is that use your existing cap space to sign other dudes, then after you've blown all your cap space, you can go over the cap to re-sign him at the end.
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Jul 16, 2021 14:58
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MagusofStars posted:That Bulls/Sonics trade is fantastic, because that is the sort of draft deal that happens all the time in the real NBA - Team A wants to upgrade at a position, but they need to unload their current player to do so, so they agree to swap with Team B, who is thinking "Team A is misusing this guy / he's a poor fit there but would work for us / whatever". In a lot of cases this tends to end up as a true win/win scenario where both teams end up reasonably happy with the trade. Yep! Precisely. Only, this isn't just an RFA. This is an RFA that was also a #1 overall pick that has been getting significant minutes on a team that was just a second seed in the playoffs.
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Jul 16, 2021 17:15
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I know that you're not going to do this, but I will ask anyway as someone who grew up near Nottingham... please edit Robin Hood onto the team.
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Jul 17, 2021 17:02
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JustJeff88 posted:I know that you're not going to do this, but I will ask anyway as someone who grew up near Nottingham... please edit Robin Hood onto the team. I have a confession to make. I wouldn't feel right about this. I said I didn't edit the name, and I didn't. But I definitely edited the actual player. I had to show off that the game actually made a player with this name but his initial draft class rank was like, 180 or something along those lines. So I sort of boosted him and maybe went a little bit overboard. I aimed for "This guy gets drafted at all" and somehow got him into the lottery. So if I added him to my own team, I both have a guy I deliberately improved and also have somewhat of an idea of how he'll develop, and it'd be like cheating. To summarize what I've done to Robin Hood: - I boosted his potential to very high (but not to max. Though, that might change as the AI seems to have its own camps and I do some potential tweaking each season to everyone in the league under 28---which takes about an hour, if anyone's curious---sort of as an attempt to get a little bit of white noise tossed into the machine) - I upped his ability to steal the ball in a number of ways, not just boosting steals but also paying good attention to help defense and defensive IQ and consistency. - I upped his outside shooting in a number of ways. - I gave him some tendencies to take long straight-on three-pointers (and also straight-on from mid-range) and gamble on defense I made all of these tweaks before noticing that he was a 6'11 center. - Then I made him 7'1. Anyhow, he should be pretty weird because of my interference, and hopefully has some fun potential. If the AI develops him, he should be a future DPOY candidate if the AI doesn't completely ruin him. The game sort of has its own chaos built in, so after three or four years with the AI I might consider trade offers involving him---I'd have somewhat of an idea of how he develops, but the AI doing its own thing could derail that. I really don't understand player development in 2k at all, especially because the tools I have like the "Player Mentorship" don't actually work. Like, because the game is broken, I legitimately cannot set a player to mentor another player at all. It immediately cancels, so all my own dudes have to develop on their own out of pure chaos---I don't think the AI has the same problem. I know player tendencies and skills sometimes develop wildly different than their starter packages through some esoteric combination of teammates, coaching staff, and system. So.... the tldr answer is "It'll probably never happen, but at the very least I want the AI to develop him into enough of an unknown quantity" Because he's the only guy I tweaked to this degree, I intend on keeping tabs on him. Presumably, he'll be in the G-league his first year, since he had the lowest OVR of anyone taken in the first round and Boston actually has Centers. (Side note, there's no Lincoln green in the NBA, but I was pleased to see him go to the greenest team, something I had zero control over.) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ All this probably raises the question: How often do I edit players? - As stated, I throw some random static into younger players' potential every offseason. Small numbers. Basically a point or two in either direction, determined randomly. - When I remember (which I've forgotten the last couple of drafts---I'm still used to the old fart drafts) I edit the ages of draft picks downward to better reflect reality. 2k will frequently have players be like, 24 in the draft, which is kinda nutty. Here's an Article on Chris Duarte. He's 24 years old and the article opens with stating that is "By far the oldest player in the 2021 NBA Draft." because it's really high. Davion Mitchell is regarded as the most "NBA ready" player in this year's draft and he's only 22. And he's a junior, but he's a 4 year junior. So 2k really just misses with draft age. When I remember, I write down the names of every player taken in the first round that is 22 or older and I randomize their ages down---this won't make everyone teenagers, the 24+ year olds will just become 21 or 22, but the 22 year olds might suddenly become freshmen. I do not modify ages of anyone taken in the second round---I just sort of leave it in the narrative as "maybe the reason this guy fell to the second round is he has much less time to develop". Sometimes this breaks and makes guys seem like they started playing in the league at 17, which is bonkers, because I literally can't make them younger than 18. And then there's the whole off-season to potentially age. How in the hell... - I rename players that have duplicate names. I've missed a couple and it makes keeping track of things really difficult, so I try to pay attention. In the future, you might see me claim a player is another player's son or you might see a Jr or III on a name that doesn't normally have it (Yeah, 2k treats suffixes as a set part of a surname, so there's been about 20 guys with the surname "White III")---if a player has been out of the league for long enough, I might just decide to let the new player keep the same name. This will be more likely if I remember teams the other person played on, or where they went to college and it's close to the college the young player is from. At any rate, I use either behindthename.com or random-name-generator.info to find a replacement name. Then it's a fight with 2k, because a lot of innocuous real world names are apparently considered offensive and the game won't let me use them even though I am playing offline. - For international players, I'll change their country of origin to a country that better reflects their new name. All Netherlands players (Loren Mathies) were people I had to rename. Winston Alexander (Timberwolves Small Forward) was a player I had to rename and made from South Africa, where 2k won't generate players. There's a Paraguayan player running around. There's an Israeli player running around. (It's really weird that 2k doesn't seem to ever generate Israelis, as they have had more NBA players than some of the countries they do generate players from) Some kid named "Guy Boudreaux" is running around that I changed to Haiti. Etc. Etc. If you ever see a European player running around that is unambiguously black, I put them there. The game is convinced these players don't exist, but I'll spare y'all that rant, as I made it already several months ago in the thread. At any rate, making them from a more "Appropriate" country is less about making the names make sense, and more about "giving countries that 2k won't generate players from actual representation" to add a bit more color to the game and hopefully make it look less same-y over the course of the thread. - Sometimes when I edit a player's name, I'll randomly edit their college. Usually this is just holding the button down and seeing what happens. This might also make them suddenly international, which is OK; you can't always tell what country a player came from based on their name. Teddy Vaughn was a player I renamed and I set his college to Illinois Institute of Art - Chicago, specifically because 1)one of my best friends briefly went there and hated it and 2)I kept giggling at the thought of a professional basketball player coming from an art school without a sports program. I feel like Teddy Vaughn's terribleness and popularity despite his terribleness is a way of the universe punishing me directly for this one action. He'd probably still be on the team to this day if he would have been content with doing the things he's actually good at. - Sometimes when I edit a player's name, I'll notice that their career trajectory is especially tragic and I'll feel bad and make it nicer. I only make this change if it's something I notice by chance---but if I'm gonna take the time to actually make these guys have a unique name, I sure as hell don't want them immediately going into decline at 22 years old. Sure, that sort of thing sometimes happens, where a Rookie season is the player's peak. And it'll still happen. I don't edit every player. Just duplicates. - I have extended the peaks of a few players that have repeatedly made the all-star team, because I want to encourage more of the generated players to go into the Hall of Fame---I loathe the idea that the league will never be at the same strength as it is today. - Sometimes a player's age will glitch and they won't age up because their birth year is expressed completely differently from when they're a draft pick to when they play in the league and this variable sometimes gets stuck in the pre-draft portion. As most players are just kinda there it can be years before I notice a player isn't aging. I fix this error whenever I see it. This hasn't happened in a while, but I remember a small handful of incidents where instead of like, a year or two, it aged a player 10 years, and I felt bad for the AI of that particular team. In my head, I imagine it as the player failing a drug test. As a side note, Giovenco Paciani's age glitched in a way that, as near as I can tell, is completely unique (or maybe I only caught his weird glitch because he's one of the best players the simulation has ever generated.) his age is impossible. He's another guy that supposedly started playing at 17 (which is a known bug I discussed a few moments ago) but he was also a stash player (I want to say a 2 year stash, at that)--- so his age is completely impossible. I've brought it up before, but it's worth repeating, because I'll sometimes call him something like a "Possible time lord" and this is what I'm referring to. - On that note, international stash contracts are completely broken. I had an entire post about this before, but you're supposed to be allowed to have 3 players that are stashed overseas. Which is false, but let's rock with it because the game can only be expected to handle too much data. It still doesn't work. The game cannot handle adding a stash player to a roster that already has one, even if the player is coming over the same year. WHY it handles the draft before it removes stash years from international players, I have no idea. But in effect, a team will never, ever reach their cap of 3 stash players unless all three are taken in the same year. And a lot of teams will take a stash player when they already have one. The end result is, chances are the actual limit on how many players a team can have stashed is one. Because 2k is a broken dumpster fire that needs to be held accountable for their malevolent treatment of their customers. Anyhow, literally every offseason I have to manually edit a stash contract to a regular contract. Usually it's a person that is already coming over, so nothing happens, but sometimes the AI will go ham on stashers and the end result is I have to bring one over a couple years early. Aforementioned post; one of my best rants - In addition to making free throws harder in general, I reduced Landry Shamet's free throw attribute from 99 (not sure its this high by default; might have developed) to 95. I've since noticed a lot of players hit 99 and it's been a number of years since the "perfect from the line for an entire season" thing has happened, so I no longer feel like interference on free throws is necessary. - If I notice a playoff opponent doing something mean to me, and they don't have a badge for it, I will give them a bronze badge after the playoffs. - For a while there, if a team that wasn't the Honu won the championship, I boosted the potential of every player under 30 that played significant minutes by 2. I'm not sure when I stopped doing this, but it didn't seem to make a huge difference either way. - And finally, one thing I didn't change was Steve Rogers' blocks. In the NBA, he wasn't particularly great at blocking, even for a small forward. (though he was good at defense) I have no idea how he lead all collegiate players in blocks as a small forward, or how he hit his ludicrously high block number in college, but it was absolutely perfect and those brief moments of joy in the madness sometimes help keep me going. - So in conclusion, my editing of Robin Hood is a fairly unique thing---definitely the most I've hosed around with a specific player. In a way, he's kind of an experiment. I don't plan on doing this to other players going forward, but hey, if there's one thing this post illustrates, it's that I can be pretty arbitrary and prone to fits of whimsy. So.... I wouldn't rule it out. One thing I won't do is cheat my own players better. If I did, I'd make them complain less about touches, you bastards.
Veryslightlymad fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jul 17, 2021 |
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Jul 17, 2021 19:24
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I didn't really expect you to bring him over, whether he had been strengthened or not. It would have been even more appropriate if he were a small guard who was an elite long-range shooter, but the fact that he was drafted by a green team was just too perfect. Mind you, the Honu are green, but not quite the stereotypical shade.
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Jul 17, 2021 19:53
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Veryslightlymad posted:
I feel like it's insufficient to just put this one in text, so I took some screen grabs.  This is what a player's age will look like for a normal player in the NBA (The player here is Alain Sonnet, if anyone's curious). As you can see, once they're in the NBA, it expresses their age as a birth year.  Meanwhile, this is how it looks on a prospect. You can see that variable doesn't even have the same name. Why it's handled this way, I don't really know. I have a guess, in that I think it's related to the DNA system where you can straight up put an historical player into a draft class. If you can make any draft class contain Kobe Bryant, you don't want his year of birth being listed as 1978. That'd look pretty weird if he's playing in 2065. Once they're drafted, it switches from one to the other. But what'll happen sometimes is the Year of Birth will be expressed as though it were an Age. So I might see "Year of Birth: 22" ....and it doesn't mean 2022 (which would be a realistic birth year for this season.... god I've been doing this for a while, haven't I?) It just keeps them at Age 22. And since Age is a static number, they never actually age up. So they never go into decline and might even never reach their peak. To make matters worse, this happened every time I edited a player's age before they were drafted---so I stopped doing it. This is why I put up with the much harder route of "writing the names down of players that are drafted as unreasonably old" because the season I noticed this glitch was after I had been editing draft ages for a couple of years. So I had to manually edit nearly 200 players' ages to unbreak them. And you can't fix the age/year of birth glitch on quick edit. I had to go into every player's profile, wait for their model to load (since this is the one part of the game that requires the graphical assets to load first---you'd think the game part of the game would, and you'd be wrong. Just this one spot where it's least necessary. That's the one they force on us. I hate them so much.) and then after it loads, check to see if their Year of Birth was expressed as a two digit age, and then fix it. This took hours. But! The glitch will spontaneously occur without having made any edits to age. Sometimes it'll just get randomly stuck and I hate it. Why is everything in this game broken?
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Jul 17, 2021 19:58
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 I had no idea of the lengths you are going to keep the simulation from breaking itself or breaking you. I am in awe.
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Jul 18, 2021 09:05
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frankenfreak posted:
Some of this stuff I've gotten into a groove for that I can get through it really fast, but other stuff takes longer and longer, which is a smallish part of why updates are still slow even though I have no other obligations. But if I don't tell the people, the people will never know. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chapter 28: 2043-2043 Part 2: All-Star Approach  Opening day is a nice little win by a number of Honu, with Freddy Tiggs either setting or tying his career high. Is this a good sign of things to come (....hard to say. Tiggs' career path is a little too close to Teddy Vaughn's for comfort. If he can be Teddy without the Ego, he might be an excellent bench big for years to come.)  Hugh Morrison continues to be his "old" self, after a few years of misery. I think it's safe to say that the last couple of seasons aren't a fluke resurgence.  A minor injury puts Sonnet out for a short break, and Coach Doncic, not wanting to screw up his very productive bench rotations, decides to skip over Calloway and Paxson and start our Finnish Rookie Rasmus Maki. Though he commits a few turnovers more than I'd like, I must say, Maki did not disappoint. During his first stash year, I was convinced he was not going to make the NBA at all, but hey, he seems to have actual value.  Andersen once again has a few grumbles here and there about touches, but every now and then will have a big game like this which makes him happy again. I still haven't had to interject and manually give him more touches or really screw with chemistry, which is great. I really hope I don't get put in a position where I might have to trade Andersen, because, again, I'm legit worried that a starter Tiggs would just turn into Teddy Vaughn.  Compared to last year, Reeves has been really quiet. He's still one of our best scorers (I think currently second after Sonnet) but I doubt he'll make the all-star team again.  When all 4 of the Honu big 4 are clicking, this is a seriously hard team to defeat. The Raptors, for their part, are a shell of the team that just got to the finals.  Of course, even just the Honu big 2 working in unison is a really difficult matchup for anyone to overcome. We have so many weapons and ways of winning.  0 for 16. Just Teddy doing Teddy things.  Despite definitely being for realsies in decline, Sonnet is having the best season of his career. It's yet another big argument for why OVR is a trash system that either needs an overhaul or just become abolished entirely. It adds nothing to the game except a handicap for the AI. The player doesn't benefit from OVR existing at all. To slow down his inevitable aging, I burned one of our camps on Sonnet in the off-season. Also worth noting, we had three camps this season. I've only ever seen two. I have no idea why we have 3 now. My best guess is our team's athletic trainer being upgraded to an A- guy.  The Honu as a group are just obscene. This last game I took a screen grab for shows what happens when arguably the best team in the league goes up against the worst team in the league (Somehow. Darrell Logan is injured, which is a huge part of it. I think Reed Gibson and uh... whoever their power forward is... are both deep into career decline, too. Sort of like last year's Warriors in real life. Since they have two MVP Caliber players, I won't declare them as finished, but Cleveland's window is closing fast.)  Huge trade out in the east, as the Hawks get a straight upgrade at Center. I don't like the idea of potentially facing Radu with an even better center. I'm glad that's out east where I have three full chances for someone else to knock them out of the playoffs. Not shown: The Neon and Nets perform a swap between the shambling corpses of Homer Berry and Rich Hurley, which might just be what the Neon need to get into their first playoff berth since the move to Vegas. STANDINGS West    Don't know why most of the teams at the bottom are at the bottom, except for the Nuggets; Steve Dunn took a big injury. The big news is Portland is really good. It seems that Brett Andersen and Theodore Thompson are both big kicks in the pants to this ailing franchise, but more importantly:  At some point during the offseason, Portland got an enormous coaching upgrade. I see you, DeAndre Ayton. You'll be one of the best coaches in the league once you're inevitably promoted. Also, way to represent your new team's colors in a suit. Very chic. East    There's something deeply cursed about seeing both Minnesota and Memphis at the top of the Eastern Conference, but hey, that's the future. The colors at the top just look wrong. Detroit still has its world class defensive center, Jason Holmes, and Zach Cooper is playing like someone who could win MVP in any other season but this one. A big part of why Minnesota is so good is Emmanuel Barbosa, who is a threat to win sixth man of the year this season, but smart money is on New York's Milos Novak repeating. Milwaukee is really disappointing, but that's what happens when a recent MVP leaves your team, even if the replacement player is themselves a newly minted All-Star. (Spoiler alert.)  All Star 2044 commentary: ~ Donald Powers (C, Trailblazers, R1P13, 2028) is scoring 6 less points per game this season than last year, but he's also playing beside another top 10 (probably?) player in the league and a decent coaching staff for a change. He is still ludicrously efficient. ~ Jessie Lowe (PF, Ravens, R1P6, 2028) is fully recovered from his injury and is averaging a pair of sweet 16s. ~ Terrell Petersen (PG, Spurs, R1P9, 2030) is doing his usual thing. Generally being one of the best point guards in the league averaging a nice 28/4/9 ~ Craig Curry (SG, Lakers, R1P9, 2035) has somehow managed to distinguish himself among the rest of the stacked Lakers. He's got 29 points per game and is very cleanly in the 50/40/90 club thus far. ~ Manny Cruz (C, Knicks, R1P12, 2034) stands as good a shot as I've seen of actually knocking Homer Barry off the DPOY throne. He's also averaging 17 and 14. The Bulls' Dante White III might also challenge. ~ Dakoulas Balidis (SG, Cavaliers, R1P1, 2032) is the kind of player I usually boot from the All-Star team, since his team is literally the worst in the league. I did not kick him from the team. ~ Ian Erikkson (SF, Warriors, R1P2, 2033) is actually in his fifth all-star game and is replacing Teddy Vaughn because the stupid motherfucker finally lost the fan vote and I can replace him with a competent player. We've seen Erikkson before. He's the one "Finesse" player on the entirety of the Warriors, and has to pick up even more slack now that those idiots got rid of Max Steele. ~ Brett Andersen (SG, Trailblazers, R2P34 2032) is a great and powerful sorcerer, as responsible as his coaching staff for pulling the dirt-eating Trailblazers back up to respectability. ~ Jackie Dudley (C, Mavericks, R2P10, 2030) forever will have my respect because unlike almost every other player in this badly programmed piece of poo poo game that can't shoot threes has developed an actual tendency to not attempt really stupid threes. This trait would fix a lot of the terrible shooting big men. ~ Eugene Fisher (SG, Heat, R1P11, 2031) somehow also had his scoring decline without Andersen on the team. However, just eyeballing the Heat in general, it looks like most of the incidental roster has been replaced with guys that can shoot just a little bit better than what they had last season. They were pretty scary last season, too. ~ Alexey Kersey (PF, Hawks, R1P17, 2030) is that rarest creature of all, a power forward that shoots well from both 2 and 3 in NBA2k20. Yet another weapon on Radu's team that Radu did not need. I'll get to that monster in a second. ~ Dagan Zozulin (C, Heat, R1P22, 2034) is another center that doesn't shoot stupid threes. As such, he is averaging 14 and 14 on close to 60% shooting from the field. ~ Radu Constantin (SG, Hawks, R1P10, 2030) is leading the league in points per game, player efficiency rating, NBA efficiency, Game Score, True Shooting%, Free Throw Rate, Box +/- (despite not being on the team with the most wins!), points per weighted shot, and estimated wins added. He is second in effective field goal percentage and bottom 10 in turnover rate. Bottom 10 in turnover rate. Imagine a guy who was an even better scorer than James Harden and was one of the least likely players to commit a turnover in the entire league.~ Dwight Dixon (PF, 76ers, R1P1, 2031) will miss the all-star game with a pulled right calf muscle. I swear to GOD if this game replaces him with Teddy Vaughn who is barely shooting 30% I'm gonna track down the production head of this game and waterboard them until they're nothing more than a bleached skull. ~ Loren Mathies (PF, Grizzlies, R1P6, 2033 but also R1P6 2031) is posting exactly as good of a season as last year where he was a viable MVP candidate, but for some strange reason doesn't look like an MVP candidate this year. I wonder why. ~ Zach Cooper (PG, Pistons, R1P1, 2036) is technically second place on the MVP leader board, boosting the Pistons to first place in the East. I guess he gets more rebounds than Alain Sonnet, who'll probably struggle to get on the third team, despite consistently being right there with guys like Cooper and Terrell Petersen. ~ Theo Hood (SF, Jazz, R1P5, 2035) is having a better individual season than he did last year and looks tremendous, but unfortunately for him, the Jazz as a whole are just in ruins. ~ Gregory Hayes (C, Sonics, R1P16, 2035) is a 1 time all-star that replaces... uh... Michael Torres, I think. He should have been an all-star several times, but despite the game looking at centers as though they were front court players, it by default only puts I think 2 centers on the all-star team. It's very, very weird. Anyhow, Hays has averaged 18 and 10 on really, really efficient shooting for his entire NBA career. He's worth 10 Teddy Vaughns. ~ Hugh Morrison (C, Honu, R1P3, 2033) is, as I said, back to his old self, and has been extremely consistent with the numbers he put up the last couple of years. He's my special boy and I love him. ~ Alain Sonnet (PG, Honu, R1P34, 2030) had to be manually added to replace some loser and is only on his fifth all star team. No, I don't know why I had to manually add him when he's almost exactly the same counting stats (minus a couple of rebounds) as Terrell Petersen and Zach Cooper, but shoots about 7% better from the field. Sonnet is currently 5th in the league in PER. ~ Edmond Jenkins (SF, Timberwolves, R1P3, 2035) is making only 3 million dollars per year and is on his 6th NBA team after his original team, Miami, didn't match his RFA. I manually added him to replace some loser on a losing team. He's averaging 18/6/6 on good shooting. Abolish OVR, you worthless pieces of poo poo. ~ Patric Love (PG, Voyageurs, R1P23, 2034) is posting a career high in assists, which is still nearly two worse than Sonnet, and doesn't even have the rebounds of Sonnet, and he has less points per game on worse shooting but the loving game still put him in the all star team. Anyhow, as "bad" as that made him sound, those numbers are still good enough to be here. He's really good. He's just, you know, not better than my player the game repeatedly snubs just to spite me. ~ Sam Drew (PG, Pelicans, R1P1, 2035) is literally worse than Sonnet in every statistical category and plays in the same conference and the game added him to the all-star game. Why no, I'm not bitter. Why do you ask. ~ Boyd Slaughter (PF, Bucks, R1P1, 2037) makes his first all star game. And is the kind of guy I would replace since the Bucks are pretty bad, but honestly, he's having a terrific year and also I hate that the game has screwed this fictional character so many times throughout his career. He is a #1 pick that plays like a #1 pick and just dissed by the unbelievably stupid AI. It's so stupid. It feels stupider every season. Please help me.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:36
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I haven't paid attention at all, but out of curiosity I looked and Milwaukee won the NBA championship in a slightly shortened season over the Suns. I'm one of those rational weirdos who hates dynasties in sport and the NBA is nauseatingly notorious for those, so it was rather nice to see a finals between two teams that aren't traditional powerhouses with inherited privilege in a big market like the Lakers. I would have preferred to see Phoenix win their first title as a franchise and also because I am sick of people blathering on about Giannis (not even going to try and spell his surname), but the Bucks have only ever won one title 50 bloody years ago, so that's a heck of a story. That said, if it turns into a 90s Bulls/60 Celtics/James & Wade Miami situation, everyone can gently caress off. It's neither admirable nor impressive to watch someone or something with every advantage walk all over the rest.
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Jul 22, 2021 02:45
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Agreed! That's why I root for the Detroit Lions even though I'm a Packers fan!
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Jul 22, 2021 03:48
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In this simulation universe, I'm sure random fans are absolutely sick of the Honu, and are wondering when they'll finally go away.
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Jul 22, 2021 04:16
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Chapter 28: 2043-2044 Part 3: End of Regular Season This game is going to kill me. It is actually going to give me a stroke. After the all-star break game (the team with Morrison and Sonnet one, Zach Cooper is All-Star MVP), we pick right back up and continue to roll, starting with a solid performance from Hugh Andersen against the Knicks.  During the extension window, I make an executive choice to keep Viana for a couple more years. We're thinnest at the SG/SF area of players, and particularly size-wise as the 2. But Viana ably covers both of those needs, so I intend to hold onto him for quite a while. Also, he's way better than his OVR rating, but that's because OVR is loving terrible, actively makes the game worse, and should be abolished.  Want another example? Check out this cool second round kid earning 3 Player of the Month awards. That's funny. Says he's on two different teams. Partway through the season, he was traded from Chicago to Cleveland.  Who immediately make an executive decision to stop playing him. As Chicago is otherwise without a center, he went from the starting position, (where he performed more than ably....those are drat solid numbers for a starter) to the absolute bottom of the reserve list. (though, he did get spot minutes here or there toward the end of the season) His trade value was not impacted anywhere near enough by what his legitimate performance was---he was on pace to be named Rookie of the Year---it was almost entirely based off his low OVR. So Chicago basically gets insanely lucky in the second round of the draft, but the AI can't realize what they won here, and says "ah, but he sucks, though" and trades him for peanuts. Cleveland has Darrell Logan, so I wouldn't expect them to make this Bradley guy their starter, but they should have seen his pre-trade stat line of 14/9 and made him a part of their bench rotation. Nope. And he'll develop less now, as he won't be getting playtime. What is this crap. No one is this stupid. Abolish. OVR. [img]https://lpix.org/4077014/0105HonuGame.png[/img Anyhow, at one point we run the Nuggets out of the gym. It's weirdly empty now that we've completely surpassed them. No one's really grabbed me the same way as a true Rival.  Hugh Morrison records a triple double in a night where San Diego holds most of the team to some difficult shooting.  A few weeks later he follows that up with a 7 block game, giving the excellent Jazz defense a taste of their own medicine. Honolulu has been clicking, and everything is going our way when, nearly at the end of the season, disaster strikes.  Well that's a swift kick in the depth chart. The game wants me to run 0 minutes of primary shooting guards at shooting guard, because, for the trillionth time, OVR is a miserable game mechanic that makes the game worse, and keeps Viana at the bottom of our rotation. I don't make him the starter, which goes to Calloway for now, but I do switch his minutes around with Saramago. Like, the game can't realize on its own that I have an efficient replacement on my bench itching to get minutes. Of four possible decisions it could make, it makes the dumbest possible one by default. It could 1)Replace Reeves with the next SG on the depth chart---this would be Viana. I'm OK with this not being the option it goes with, because it's not very realistic and positions are at least a little fluid. 2)Replace Reeves with Calloway or Paxson, both of whom are point guards, one of whom has the size to play the 2, and the other is very good at catch-and-shoot, and then build the rotations to be balanced. This is what I force it to do. 3)Replace Reeves with Calloway, since he's the next best guard, and then shorten the rotations --- While I wouldn't like this, it's at least somewhat realistic and definitely a thing real coaches do. Especially in the playoffs. It still bases what it does off of a player's OVR and not their performance---Viana should probably be on all our rotations, but definitely would make the cut for a deliberately shortened one. As it stands, I mostly leave him out and sometimes manually swap the bottom couple of guys in the rotation for the rest of my bench sporadically throughout the year. 4)Replace Reeves with Calloway, keep the same number of guys in the rotation as before the injury, and then just add the next highest OVR guy to the rotation and not pay any attention to how badly this fucks with rotations and how far out of position this can put players. This is the dumbest of all options, and therefore, obviously, the one 2k goes with. I hate it.  Right when we're down, I get kicked one last time in the ribs, just to make sure. Morrison can and will play through this injury, and it doesn't effect his performance much at all. But! It's one that can randomly get worse/cause him to miss sporadic games, and its got a really lengthy duration. We could probably beat a 6, 7, or 8 seed even without Reeves and Morrison, but I doubt we could do any better than that. A string of flare-ups or a worsening injury could doom us for the playoffs, but frankly, they already look a little grim. Guess what impossibly stupid thing the game did again?  And just like last time, I reverse this decision. It's.... I can't even... It's not even 35 percent. I legitimately have no idea at this point why the game is so obsessed with this guy, but it's going to kill me. What a loving bad joke. This is what this company wants you to buy every single year. gently caress them. Just like last time this happened, I replace him with someone that makes sense, and kick him off the all-NBA teams.  Doesn't that look better? Note: This is down from his all-star break numbers.  He might have beaten OJ Bradley with these numbers, but I'm not convinced. Robin Hood has yet to see real NBA playing time.  Novak is real, real good. I'm interested in his career.  This year's Homer Barry of the year award goes to.... HOMER BA---wait, what the hell? OK, well. Good thing this guy plays defense, I guess, because he's otherwise not fit to be on the floor. I'm still not sure he's a net positive, but you do you, guy.  Somewhat deserved. No real eye-popper improvements that I was able to notice.  Deserved. This is either Philadelphia's coach (who held on to the 1 seed despite Dixon spending a chunk of the season injured) or Golden State (who got to #1 despite losing their sixth man) All NBA teams: First  Second  Third  Changes: I removed Teddy Vaughn entirely. I bumped Mathies from Second team to First team. I moved Hood from Third to second, I added J.P. Reece to third team. God drat, 2k. God drat you. I think it's only going to get worse. Oh, and Boyd Slaughter, in his first year actually allowed to start makes the third team. All Defense First team:  Second:  Barry fell all the way to the second team.  All Rookie First team:  Second:  Not very many rookies got playing time. STANDINGS AND PLAYOFF TABLE West:    Big excitement in Portland for their team's long awaited playoff return, and also in Vegas, seeing the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. The longest drought is now jointly held by the New Orleans Pelicans and the Washington Wizards, neither of whom have made the playoffs since 2036. East    I was really worried I was damning Minnesota forever when I moved them to the tougher East, but nope! They've managed to actually hold their own. How important can Dante White's defense really be if his squad is still giving up 116 a game? Wait, how the hell do you guys have two all defense first team players? Go gently caress yourself, 2k.  Finally, the team gets an announcement toward the close of the season, regarding one of our beloved veterans.  BJ Lawrence has decided to call it quits a season early (saving me about 12 million dollars. Thanks BJ!) and move on to the next phase of his life. He says he can leave with his head held high.  Significant minutes on six championship teams. You're goddamn right you can hold your head up. A late second round draft pick that dramatically outplayed his expectations, Lawrence has made a career out of his high energy, skill on the boards, and underrated low post play. He spent his entire career in Honolulu and has been a rock-solid cornerstone of our franchise for a decade and a half. .....but no all-star teams, so. I mean, I guess he's just not the kind of guy that would ever get his jersey retired by a franchise.  Just....... I hate 2k. It's not even a joking rant anymore. I truly despise this company and their approach to their simulation of basketball. It's soulless, money-grubbing, badly designed trash. Never loving buy one of these games.
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Jul 26, 2021 18:25
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well pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get back out there son you still got another 5 1/2 decades of simulation basketball to manage
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Jul 28, 2021 19:01
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Chapter 28: 2043-2044 Part 4: Playoffs This game is dog poo poo. I'm sorry updates have been sparse. 1)It's legitimately getting harder to power through the idiocy of this game. 2)My pharmacy straight-up loving lost my prescription on my narcolepsy meds, so I've been running on empty for the last week.      Injuries going into the playoffs are few, but they're pretty big ones. Edmund Battle is a guy we've dueled before, an effective stopper at Power Forward, and probably the only real chance the Hawks would have of slowing down Dwight Dixon if they played. They'd be relying on Radu more than ever, but he's had a pretty OK season so far. Powers is potentially crippling for the Trailblazers, but 1-2 weeks before the playoffs can be as few as zero missed games, so there's a chance all three of their injured players suit up in time for game 1. Henrik Marciniak is another power forward stopper, and the Spurs could suffer a little from him being out, but honestly, they'll probably be fine. They are quite a bit better than the Neon. Manny Cruz is the best player on the Knicks, so that's probably bad news for them, going against Dwight Dixon as an 8 seed. The real losers in the Injury pool are the Honu, who look hosed as a 2 seed missing their only standard rotation shooting guard.  Coach opts to start Calloway in game 1. The Mavs' calling card is defense. Currently, they have a gaping hole at Point guard thanks to the failure to re-sign Zach Cooper. Doyle isn't bad, but he's not a starter, let alone a playoff caliber starter. Catinella is one of the best two way players in the league, just a supreme pest on defense, and versatile, if not spectacular on offense. Watson and Gregory are both versatile switchy players who do a little of everything, but most of it on the defensive end. Gregory was sometimes the starting power forward on the excellent Utah Jazz team of a season ago that put the clamps on the entire league. (His starting or not seemed to depend on if they put Jukic at the 4 or the 5) Jackie Dudley is a former MVP.  After one quarter of basketball, I would like to repeat myself: Jackie Dudley is a former MVP.  "Luckily" he ends the game with only a double double double, and not a triple double double (not to be confused with a triple double)  Actually, it is lucky. We managed to win game 1 on the basis that we have this Alain Sonnet guy who is pretty good at basketball.  You know.  I guess.  At the end of one round of playoff play, Sonnet leads all players in PER and GameScore, ahead of such demons as "Literal best player in the league Dwight Dixon" "Hungry MVP candidates Donald Powers and Loren Mathies" and "Still an Inexplicable Playoff God, Lou Pollard". He's not going to make the Hall of Fame, and sometimes this game makes me drink. It's so bad. It's so emotionally taxing. This company actively hates the people playing it. It disdains us because we feed them money for their abuse. The cycle must be broken. Never, ever, ever buy another 2K game. Drive them out of business. Anyhow, we swept the Mavs, despite the lack of Reeves. As I said, we're still a drat good team and I expected us to beat anyone we played in the first round. It's the second round and further where we're in trouble, because that's when we're expected to play against real teams. Also sweeps in the West are the Trailblazers over the Rockets (By god, that's Donald Powers' music! Yeah, he didn't miss a game.) and the Spurs over the Neon (Cool that you made the playoffs, Vegas. Now take this memory into the offseason for motivation.) The Supersonics manage a 6 game upset over the Warriors, who probably could have used Max Steele, but eh. Anyhow, 2k is dogshit. Way, way, WAY too many 1/8 and 2/7 upsets happen in this game. Don't believe me? Run a few hundred playoff simulations and compare the numbers to history. Everything about 2k is broken and wrong. loving. Everything. Out East, Pollard's brilliance upsets the new-look Pistons and makes a fool out of Zach Gibson. Paul George is long retired, but playoff P is real, and his name is Lou Pollard. Anyone remember that time he won finals MVP and led the playoffs in scoring from the bench? No one gets Radu'd this year, as Dagan Zozulin goes berserk on the crippled Hawks front-court. The Knicks manage the impossible.... .....and win a single game off the 76ers without Manny Cruz. Seriously, I can't believe they won a game. Minnesota upset Memphis from the lower seed, powered by brilliant performances from their three small forwards, Winston Alexander, Emmanuel Barbosa, and Edmond Jenkins. Memphis doesn't have a true small forward, so... uh... Oops  The Spurs look really different from the last time we played. The only guy here I recognize (as a Spur) is Terrell Petersen, who is still his usual "yearly threat to win MVP" self. They still have Grant Reece off the bench, and he's still a real mother fucker. They also have Reinaldo Carlos somehow, pulling a mid-season trade from the Sonics, and I HATE THAT GUY. CJ Dawkins is a competent Center in a league of truly great centers. Henrik Marciniak, as discussed on the injury report, is an excellent defense-first power forward, but one that can actually shoot, too. Sort of like a mid-range version of Hugh Andersen. (Why are so many names that traditionally end in "son" in 2k the significantly less common Scandinavian "sen"? You dogshit company.) Kenneth Sutton is a 3 and D small forward, and Timothy Jacobs is a 3 with no D shooting guard, which, man, if we had Frederick Reeves, we'd eat this team's lunch.  We do not have Frederick Reeves. We won 1 game when Calloway decided to bully Jacobs, but that's it. The Trailblazers effortlessly sweep the Sonics. A relatively fresh Eugene Fisher takes a single game for the Heat against the 76ers, but Dixon takes over and dispatches them in 5. In another 6 game series, Minnesota continues its strong run, Jenkins looking particularly good. Faced with a real team for the first time in the playoffs, the Blazers just barely squeak by the Spurs in a seven game classic for the Western Conference Championship. The 76ers are comparatively very fresh, having swept the Timberwolves. The strategy of "Only using small forwards" can beat the second best power forward in the league (Memphis's Loren Mathies) when he has no small forward of his own, but it just messily explodes when it goes up against the best power forward in the league and a 6'11 monster small forward that averages like, 12 rebounds a game in Noel Vaughn.  This leads to an incredible NBA finals that looks like this. Probably the two best big men in the league today, this year's #1 pick and Rookie of the Year, a former Finals MVP, a bizarre small forward that is on the same team as Dixon and still leads the team in rebounds per game, a couple of coaching staffs that are no longer dogshit..... it has it all. The last time either team was in the finals, they won. It's been over 20 years for either team. De'Aaron Fox was Finals MVP for the 76ers, so long ago, and the Trail Blazers had the amazing comeback from life-threatening injury season for Damian Lillard. The series goes a full 7 games.  76er wins tend to look something like this, just an overwhelming onslaught from Dixon.  And Blazer games go a lot like this, where the real lead scorer is Brett Andersen, (always a sen. Watson, Thompson, Henderson and Morrison are sons, but all Andersens and Petersens are sens.) but Powers plays incredible, stifling defense along with some great offense, and the electric young Thompson threatening a triple double.  I'm not gonna lie, I was pulling for the Blazers here, but then again, Dixon finally getting a second banana like Noel Vaughn, the two finally being healthy at the same time, and that being all that was necessary for winning the championship after Dixon being a dominant force for so long is almost as much of a feel good story as Portland immediately being good after they fired their dog-poo poo coaching squad. It's the last "good feeling" I get. gently caress this stupid game.  Some big names retire. Doug Simms was the stalwart Power Forward of that incredible Cleveland starting 5 that threatened the championship every single year they were actually all healthy. Casey Daniel is a Teddy Vaughn/Donta Greene clone that splits the difference between the two, not quite having the defense of either and not being as good of a shooter as Greene is (still bad) but still about 5-7% better than Vaughn. Jesse Harrington was the greatest pure shooter ever. Mo Pope had an all time name.  B.J. Lawrence of course, did some things. No, it doesn't let me retire his jersey. He was never an all star and that's all this moron, star-loving company thinks matters. Imagine being a key rotation player on six loving championships and not getting your jersey retired. gently caress off, 2k. Also pictured, BJ Sparks and Spencer Person. Person was definitely an all-star, and Sparks was always in that conversation.  Jalen Gardner was pretty drat nice for a while. Joshua Carr is a former Honu and 2 time champion that eventually learned how to shoot and remained a notoriously tough defender for a decade.  Most of the remaining original coaches retired.  Former Honu assistant and longtime Clippers head coach Otis Newman retired. Guess who didn't make the Hall of Fame this time!  That's right. Nine time All Star, Jesse Harrington. This unseats the real world's Larry Foust (8x) as the most NBA all star appearances without being in the Hall of Fame. Only 2 all-NBA Appearances, but....  Casey Daniel, who kind of sucked for most of his career made it with these numbers.  And Harrington who was productive for his entire career (after his first four seasons) missed with these figures. Harrington shot better from 3 on his career than Daniel loving did from 2. gently caress 2k.  Scoring isn't everything, but hey, he managed more points than Drexler and Bird.  Imagine hitting more threes than Steph Curry on less total seasons played and not making the hall of fame. But what's more egregious? Oklahoma City doesn't retire his number. Imagine playing 12 years with a franchise, making 9 all star teams, being the greatest three point shooter ever, leading your team to the greatest playoff upset in league history and not making the hall of fame. Like, me not being able to retire BJ Lawrence's number is ridiculous. The game not deciding on its own or even letting me retire Jesse Harrington's 14 for the Thunder is a loving crime. I mean that. This company should be banned from making games. This is too loving much. It is the WORST. SPORTS. FRANCHISE. EVER. Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball is a better basketball game than NBA 2k. Slam City with Scottie Pippen is a better basketball game than NBA 2k. I regret my entire life if anyone bought one of these asinine, dogshit, garbage games because of this thread. I feel sick. It just gets worse every. Single. Update. How is it so bad at loving EVERYTHING?  The League implements some new rules. 18 year olds are back in the draft, which means I have to edit incoming players even more than I already do. Backcourt violations come back. The league commits to discouraging tanking. Which I am fine with, tanking is stupid anyhow.  The draft lottery rolls around and Charlotte shows off its commitment to excellence. This sort of shows how long we've been playing, but this really shows just how bananas Charlotte has been with chasing draft picks. They're basically a glorified G-league team, developing promising young players for better franchises. (Honolulu has benefited from this system several times)  Here's the draft order. The Clippers get some fantastic luck. The Kings pick they had actually had worse odds than their own pick, which is held by Detroit. So they vault up the draft board and leave the Pistons fuming. Meanwhile, Chicago only loses a position on their unprotected pick, thanks to a deal they had swung with Cleveland. (For the guy that should have been rookie of the year, but will probably never play another NBA Minute because 2k is loving GARBAGE.) Oh, hey, here's another thing (technically a few things) this game gets loving wrong that I forgot to screenshot. After the third draft lottery pick was selected, I got a message saying that the Bulls, who had the best odds of winning the lottery, now find themselves picking sixth. This is a scripted message and it's also wrong, for a number of reasons. 1)It's clearly scripted to happen when three teams advance in the lottery, which is wrong, because with the current lottery rules, the lottery is for picks 1-4. 2)It'll happen no matter when those three teams were selected. I've seen it display this message for a team picking 8. 3)It's loving wrong anyhow. In the real world, the Bulls would technically have the best odds, since the bottom 3 teams all have exactly the same odds under the current NBA draft lottery system. (Another reason why tanking is loving stupid, by the way) HOWEVER, in 2k, that's not modeled, or at least under whatever weird rules are currently being run, that's not modeled. The Bulls had an 18.7% chance of taking a #1 pick, the Suns had a 20% chance. So.... it's just wrong. It's actually hard to parse exactly where it's wrong, because it's wrong on so many levels. Because 2K is such irredeemable dog poo poo. Actually, I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating now that we've seen so many seasons of this worthless tire-fire game. Check out this image of Mark Tatum from the same screen shot.  Look closely. Now zoom. Enhance.  The red is mine, the grey is not. That is how this appears in game. They just have a loving JPEG transparency artifact right there. It's the most loving unprofessional poo poo. You can literally buy RPG Maker games, or independently made visual novels off of Steam, and 99% of them won't have this kind of loving lazy barebones TRASH crammed into it. I'll say it for the hundredth time: this game earned 2k a BILLION dollars. This is significantly higher than the discretionary budget for TEFAP. Donta Greene enters the coaching pool but is made into a white person. That's right, it's the staff signing window. And I can't do it. I can't do it. I know it's there waiting for me but I don't want to see it. Please, it just hurts so much. PLEASE 2k. Have a little mercy on me.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......
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Aug 5, 2021 18:52
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80 Years of Jared loving Henderson: NBA2k20 Expansion Challenge
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Aug 6, 2021 20:26
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I'm worrying a bit about VSMs mental health. VSM, have you tried OoTP baseball or Football Manager? They might make you less, well, mad (in both the American and British sense of the word)
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Aug 6, 2021 21:05
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BTF posted:80 Years of Jared loving Henderson: NBA2k20 Expansion Challenge Ironically, he would have been an improvement over the Trail Blazers' old coaching staff, because even though I made all his stats into 0s, his propensity for never playing the bench would mean Donald Powers played 48 minutes, which would be crazy good, you know, until Powers injured himself.
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Aug 6, 2021 21:09
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Do you have any hope that sooner or later he'll retire? Or is it smarter to assume that will somehow also break?
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Aug 7, 2021 06:10
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There's only one option left. We must save the league from themselves. Hire that man!
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Aug 7, 2021 06:24
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Canopus250 posted:Do you have any hope that sooner or later he'll retire? Or is it smarter to assume that will somehow also break? Something new seemingly breaks every season, if not every update. Or maybe I notice something new. I haven't noticed staff failing to retire, but their window is pretty huge and not bothered to be tied to age. John Beilein is still around, and he'd be over 90 by now.
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Aug 7, 2021 14:00
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 Informal Voting Time Sorry, I needed some time off. This game. This GAME. I have two priorities in the draft: I probably need another guard or guard/wing because even though Viana is good, my rotations get nuked when Reeves is out. Extended sequences of Hugh Andersen playing Small Forward don't go so poo poo hot for us or for Hugh, who I am amazed hasn't thrown a fit yet. I almost certainly need a new board monster to replace BJ Lawrence. Tiggs is mostly this, but I assume he's gonna want a lot of money soon, and also I have serious concerns about how he'll work moving forward, when I can't get him to stop taking threes short of actually editing his tendencies. Wingate is a jewel, but he plays just a little outside. We may need to blow up part of this gorgeous roster now. Anyhow, please order the following Solid wing/guard play Rebounding/interior defense Collecting future assets Weird unicorns In any priority you like, and that'll be my rough priority going into the next draft. I'd hold a normal draft vote, but we're still probably too good, and realistically should only add one player but have picks for two. In these scenarios "just winging it" feels better to me, but I'd still like, you know, a rough sense of how to wing it. My dream, if such a person exists (they do not) is a weird unicorn slashing shooting guard that rebounds like a big man. In addition, if you, my beloved, loyal readers have any requests or advice on what to look for in the draft, just say it, and I'll give it special attention. Lastly, I follow a young Youtube personality named Clique who posts some really entertaining 2k career sim videos with alarming frequency, and I worry for his developing psyche. No one under 35 should have to face the horrors of war. Anyhow Here's a video that kinda empirically proves just how meaningless OVR is. If you like the kid's style, he's got a metric ton of content and has something new drat near every day. And usually, usually isn't as spiritually crushed as I am. The Honu Endure, I just needed a small break. (Also, Humankind came out, and I've been anticipating it for months and months)
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Aug 23, 2021 20:58
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I also have been anticipating Humankind's release, no worries. Let's see... Unicorn - 1 Rebound/Interior - 2 Wing/Guard - 3 Future Assets - 4
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Aug 23, 2021 21:52
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Jadecore posted:I also have been anticipating Humankind's release, no worries. Yeah, that seems right.
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Aug 24, 2021 05:06
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Solid wing/guard play Rebounding/interior defense Weird unicorns Collecting future assets
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Aug 24, 2021 07:43
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Chapter 29: 2044-2045 Part 1: Draft and Free Agency A fairly bland draft with not a lot of interesting players picked, with a couple of exceptions I'll point out. Then again, it's hard to say how much impact any of this has.  There was a fairly wide open field for #1 pick with no true consensus. It'll be interesting to see what Milwaukee manages with Hollins, who comes from an NBA pedigree, albeit not a particularly storied one. Veryslightlymad posted:
 Hollins was named after his father Wayne's best friend, Harry Francis, who came to the Honu in the same year. The two became close during a year-long stint in the G-league. When asked why he named his son after his friend's last name, the elder Hollins replied, "Because Harry Hollins sounds stupid."  Charlotte's lust for lottery picks cannot be satisfied. They'll find a way to get at least one in 2047, I guarantee it.  The Ravens acquire the mother fucker that is Fabricio Nunnally. I am overjoyed at the prospect of being more likely to face this rear end in a top hat in the playoffs.  Is this a name of the draft candidate? (No, we will win) Has anyone played Breath of Fire? As it turns out, several of the players in this year's draft have, as Capcom released a 50 year anniversary edition just last season.  Astute readers will notice that once again, NBA2k shows that the one part of the simulation that makes any kind of logical sense is the draft and draft-day trade logic. Here, you see the Clippers' end game for this draft---They've got a new point guard from an earlier trade, and clearly whatever player they wanted must have been available later rather than they were picking. Splendid!  The Honu acquire a promising defense-minded wing with unusually good rebounding potential and an A+ Name Tool. Terry can play both wing positions, so he's solid insurance for the future.  Not yet finished, San Diego continues its overhaul by dealing another solid piece of their back-court rotation.  This was the guy I was aiming to draft, even though I didn't yet draft a big, and I'm crushed that he finally got picked just two picks before me. Toloni is a definite project player---his deal with Italy runs for another 3 years. However, at just 19 years old, There's still plenty of potential NBA playing time available. Toloni is one of two players in this draft that our scouts had pegged as having A+ potential, though he's quite raw and that foreign contract is certainly an obstacle. I still can't believe he fell as far as he did.  So we grab the best looking Center still on the board. Though there's no relation between them, the last time the had a 7'2 guy named Francis, it worked out pretty drat well. Also, who the gently caress names their kid Coty? I will forever see this as "Coach of the Year Francis"  Mr Irrelevant 2044 is this fine young fellow who certainly didn't get signed by the Warriors. One thing I noticed in the draft summary afterward that I never did before was this bit of weirdness with player comparisons Here's one guy's comparison:  And here's another:   I'm sure the developers intended some kind of distinction here, but.... huh? Oooof. Our off-season is gonna be expensive. I bring back all four guys. Calloway gets the most money, being the best player, but all of them except Saramago get somewhere between 18 and 22 million a year, (Saramago wouldn't deal, and accepted his 1 year qualifier of 4 million) which is a lot of money to be paying rotational guys. Probably too much. This puts Honolulu juuuust over the Luxury Tax threshold. For now, ownership (re: Me, not the game) is fine with this, as they believe that we are one of the favorites to win a championship. However, if things start to look less-than-stellar come the all-star break, the team could be headed for a big shake-up. Also worth noting is Frederick Reeves will almost certainly command a 10 million dollar a year raise that Ownership probably won't want added to the books unless something else comes off, so this season (or half-season!) is likely the last ride of our current fab five.  The 76ers add some serious scoring punch and star power with Paris Rush. They're serious about repeating.  The Bucks sign a former MVP candidate to their squad, but does it really matter when the rest of your team is a bunch of temps? I've noticed some stars do stick around, but by and large, the AI roster turnover feels absurdly high.  Paciani decides to go Ring chasing in Miami.  Much like the Bucks, the Jazz sign an MVP/All-NBA level player, but completely overhaul so much of their elite roster that it's hard to say what kind of an impact this will have on the team.  The Neon bring back Barbosa for another stint, after seeing what he was able to accomplish in Minnesota.  It's hard to tell, since it says "sign" instead of "re-sign" in a lot of relevant places, but this is essentially the same Pacers team, but with a new Power Forward, in Bruno Jukic. I have no idea how the gently caress Teddy Vaughn is a more celebrated player than Jukic. I've had both of these guys, and I know drat well which one is better, for all that I think both have serious flaws.  The Sonics lost their franchise player to Philadelphia, but they managed to acquire a former #1 overall draft pick because once again the AI decided not to contract match a number 1 pick and/or waived their rights.  Tomasovic and Shultz are both big-deal pickups for the Wizards, although both are getting up there in years. I'm not sure I see the Wizards' vision here. Anyhow, the pressure is on the Honu to succeed or change. Luckily, the consensus seems to be "we'll probably succeed"    I'm not sure if we've ever led all three of the pre-season power rankings, but we're doing it now. This probably means we're lottery bound or some poo poo, though.
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Aug 29, 2021 02:24
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There's plenty of time left for Coty to eventually become COTY, right?  Veryslightlymad posted:
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Aug 29, 2021 13:39
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