How To Fix NBA 2K's Association Mode, Part I: The Draft

Devin Kharpertian explores NBA 2K's Association mode over the next two weeks.

A few days ago, I expressed the thought on Twitter that if I was running NBA 2K's Association mode, it would be (and I'm quoting myself here) the most baller association mode ever. There are so many small (and big) fixes that could be implemented to make the experience much more realistic and fun, and yet 2K for some reason just seems content making a decent Association and making tens of millions of dollars every year. How screwed up is that?

Anyway, for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to put up my ideas on how to fix Association mode, starting with the most glaring one in my mind.

PART 1: COMPLETELY REVAMP THE DRAFT PROCESS.

The NBA draft is my personal favorite time of year, and video games consistently screw it up. 2K10 is no different. The "scouting" that occurs throughout the year is basically clicking on a player, clicking on a scout, and waiting to see what "grade" the player gets in eight very broad, very arbitrary categories. If I'm scouting someone in real life, and I tell my boss that the guy has "A+ athleticism," what does that mean? Is he super quick? A great leaper? Blazing end-to-end speed? If a guard has an "F" for rebounding, is that an F compared to other guards or an F overall? I know there's a real answer to that question, but the fact that an answer needs to be dug out is the problem.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. 2K CAN make the whole draft process much more enjoyable. The fixes I'm about to suggest are not out-of-this-world impossible to implement (although the last one might be as complicated as it is awesome).

Here are my five suggestions for restructuring the draft in Association mode.

1) Change the ways a player can be scouted. 2K11 can take a page out of NCAA Basketball 10's book here (and maybe NBA Live 10, too - I never played the association on it, so they may also do this) and have different methods of scouting. Want your scout to look up his college stats? That takes a day. Want your scout to watch a guy on film? That takes two days. Want him to go to a game? That's a four-day trip. Also, there shouldn't be a limit on how many times you can scout a player, or how many scouts can visit a player at once - there should just be less and less information to uncover as time goes on until there's nothing left the scout can get (which the user would be warned about).

Also, you should generally get the chance to see what a player looks like and moves like while you're scouting him. It's weird scouting a guy for an entire year on 2K10 and you don't realize that he's an albino redhead with dreads and a Fu Manchu mustache until the final scouting period. Just saying, it would be nice to know.

2) Change the grade system. My fix for this is a little complicated, so bear with me. NBA 2K10 has four rating categories - Offense, Defense, Physical, and Mental - and different amount of subsets for each: 18 offensive traits, 5 defensive traits (holy focus on offense, Batman), 7 physical traits, and 6 mental traits. There are also tendencies that go along with all four of these attributes, which should also be scouted - it sucks if you're a simulation Association player and you have to edit a guy's tendencies because he's a 96-rated three-point shooter but shoots 3's 18% of the time and has a 90% commit foul tendency. Yes, that was a run-on sentence - that's just how mad I am. Anyway, 2K11 is bound to have more, but for the sake of this exercise let's use these attributes.

The fix here is twofold: 1) give your scout the ability to focus on one subset of traits (I.E. send your scout to focus on a player's "mental" traits, and he'll come back with information on those six categories), and 2) Instead of letter grades for arbitrary categories, have scouts tell you the range which a player's potential attribute falls within. For instance, say Devin Kharpertian is a freshman prospect projected as the next great center in the NBA, and you're curious about his defensive skillset. You send your scout to watch game tape on him - that takes 2 days - and you get a range for each category that looks like this:

Defensive Low Post: 65-90
Block: 70-86
Steal: 42-55
Defensive Rebound: 71-89
On-Ball Defense: 51-64

(Note: the ranges that are important for that player's position would automatically be larger - you don't care about a center's on-ball defense rating, but his Defensive Low Post is extremely important. You should need to take more time to make sure it's correct. I know that it's counter-intuitive because in real life you'd have a better grasp on a guy's core abilities, but this tweak means you need to work harder to get the right range for important information.)

Pretty rangy, right? Say you're still intrigued and you decide to scout a game, still focusing on defensive attributes. Four days later, you get this report:

Defensive Low Post: 76-84
Block: 77-82
Steal: 46-49
Defensive Rebound: 81-87
On-Ball Defense: 53-58

Much closer. The longer you spend scouting a player, the more information you get about him. There should also be a critical mass - you shouldn't be able to get closer than 3 or 4 points on a range of a key attribute. But this way you get a much more clear picture of what kind of player DNA the prospect has, instead of just finding out he's got B- intangibles.

I was also thinking you could add the combine, but I don't think it's important if you can scout a guy's physical skillset midseason. That being said, the ratings for physical attributes should have some sort of real-life translation - a 99 vertical should have a number in parenthesis next to it like (44") or something. There needs to be some context with these numbers. That's more of a general 2K fix, but it needs to be stated.

Also, this is another general 2K fix and not an association fix, but add wingspan and hand size. Please. For God's sake. It's been too long. I'll type in bold all paragraph if I have to. For serious. Have them available to look at for draft prospects and have them for players. There's a reason DeJuan Blair is awesome despite being 6'5. I told you I'd type in bold for the whole paragraph. I'm super serious. Just do it.  

3) Let the draft classes change. Players don't decide that they're going to declare for the draft at the beginning of the season, they decide it at the end. The game should reflect reality in this case. Instead of auto-creating 80-ish prospects at the beginning of every year, let there be freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes. After every season, some 60-100 players declare (including a test-waters phase), and the next year all the seniors & drafted players are removed and 30-50 new freshman players are thrown into the mix. This added wrinkle would add a substantial amount of realism to the drafting process without overcomplicating the system.

There would also be a list for players that are expected to declare, but that list is not always concrete - just like real life. You can spend an entire season scouting Kyle Singler, but he may want to spend one more year at Duke - no controlling that. But that way, the next year, you already have that player scouted, and his attributes would increase while his potential would decline. For instance, let's say Devin Kharpertian - that freshman can't-miss center - decided he wanted to spend another year in school. Here's what his ratings looked like again on defense:

Defensive Low Post: 76-84
Block: 77-82
Steal: 46-49
Defensive Rebound: 81-87
On-Ball Defense: 53-58

But if he stays a year, next season they could look like this:

Defensive Low Post: 76-89
Block: 77-85
Steal: 46-51
Defensive Rebound: 81-90
On-Ball Defense: 53-59

And you'd have to scout him again to get a closer range - just not as much as you would have had to previously.

4) Let there be in-draft trades. Self-explanatory. Come on, guys.

5) Make draft day more like draft day. Only a video game could make the most awesome day of the basketball year a complete snoozefest. Spruce it up a bit! Let's have a digital Madison Square Garden with a digital green room with digital players sitting with their digital family & friends. Let's have digital David Stern come out and congratulate the digital NBA Champions and announce the digital picks. If you can't get his voice (which would be awesome but probably impossible), then just have digital Sexy Silver do it. Like he wouldn't jump at the chance. If he balks too, you could just have a text overdub. (Even with just text, there should still be audible cheering for blue-chip prospects & booing at every questionable pick. Also boo every Knicks pick.)

Let's have digital prospects jump out of their seat and hug everyone imaginable if they've got high emotion ratings, or just walk up coolly otherwise. (I literally just had the idea to have the "mental" ratings coincide with how the player greets Stern, and I love it. Bonus: if your ratings make you as nuts as Darius Miles was you smack Stern's hand away and give him the fiercest hug an NBA game will ever make. You're telling me that's not compelling?) Let's have horrendous digital suits on gigantic digital prospects. Let's have players not in the Green Room jumping out of the stands when they get taken with the 34th pick. This is not far-fetched, guys. If we can have Obama congratulate the Super Bowl victors, we can make the NBA draft fun.

While I'm on this kick, there should also be a table of four digital draft experts analyzing the draft and looking at digital highlights of the players. Actual draft day analysis is just a bunch of stock quotes about "upside," "length," and "ceiling" anyway - you're telling me you can't get 40-50 quotes/buzzwords from four analysts and make a decent draft day experience?

Of course, you'll have the option to skip all of this - it could probably be boring to most gamers if it wasn't their pick. But at least have the option there to watch the hilarity unfold.

**

So there are my five fixes. A couple of them are small and subtle, a couple of them are giant (and ultimately a little risky) revamps. But I guarantee if NBA 2K10 implemented these five changes - if they made the scouting system deeper, if they allowed you to look closer at a prospect's DNA, if they made the draft classes by college year and not NBA year, if they allowed draft-day trades, and they made draft day more interactive - you'd have an infinitely better association right there.

And that's not even tackling the rest of Association mode.

(Stay tuned as I tackle the rest of Association mode in the next two weeks.)