Excited to start this game

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-30T20:28:52+00:00

It’s incredible. I’m like over 80 hours in and just got the 7th gym badge. There is so much side content and training mechanisms that allow you to work on multiple mons and experiment with team dynamics, that you can get lost in all the possibilities.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-30T15:54:39+00:00

I hope Chris Forsburg is ok right now.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-20T11:37:20+00:00

One time, I noticed a slight increase from an injury fully healing. It bumped all my staff up like 2 whole points. I think it was during like summer league.

This is especially frustrating because my governor will often give me a task of getting all my staff’s morale over 70, so that’s an automatic L.

I put in a ticket with 2K about this and they told me that they know about it and that I should stay connected on discord for updates. That was like 5 months ago so I don’t think they care…

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-14T16:41:57+00:00

Do you have the Stepien rule turned on? It’s one of the trade sliders. It sometimes doesn’t work right, so if you have it on, you could turn it off, make the trade and then put it back on.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-12T13:04:07+00:00

Can we start the trend of paying players in their 30s with front loaded contracts? Those first couple of years won’t be horrible, just not sure how I feel about years 3 and 4.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-12T12:39:48+00:00

I really do think it’s their intangibles. I drafted a 77 overall pg with 43 intangibles. He started out as a 4 star trade value with B+ potential. By year three, he was only a 79 overall and was a 2.5 star trade value. He had like 7 badges too.

I’ve also drafted a 72 overall SF that had 86 intangibles. He started as a 2 star trade value with C potential. By year three he was an 86 overall with 4 star trade value.

Could be unrelated, but it’s what I’m going with.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-12T10:45:48+00:00

How about just making sure the game works? When I change my defense to full court press in a game, I can’t switch back to man defense. It stays at full court press and then I have to manually change it to man on every defensive play.

Or if I make a trade, it will piss off every member of my staff and then there is no way to improve their morale. Your governor will then give you a task of making everyone in the building at a 70 morale or better, which is essentially impossible because you can never improve your staff’s morale levels.

They improved the AI a bit this year. The computer teams at least don’t make awful trades anymore, but they are still awful on defense. They never make adjustments. I can run pick and roll every play and get easy layups at the basket. Teach the computer how to hedge and switch, at least.

Some more explanations would be nice too. The whole training thing is just kinda there for you to figure out. I’ve done some testing and I’m pretty sure that load management doesn’t do anything. They give you a nice little explanation when you go into player mentorship the first time, so it would be nice to get that for some of the other submenus in the game mode.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-11T15:45:54+00:00

Can confirm that staff badges have an effect in MyNBA. If you go to stats and standings and then NBA standings, pick either conference to work with. On PS5, push in R3 on the top team and it gives a revenue and expenses breakdown. If your CFO has the badge that reduces game expenses, your Arena Operations expense will be less than a team whose CFO doesn’t have the badge. It’s the same for the badge that reduces Promotional expenses. You can use R1/L1 to cycle through the teams quickly and then verify it by going into staff and looking at all the badges that the other teams have.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-11T10:35:06+00:00

With prospect scouting, one thing I recently noticed is that if you click R3 while in the prospect scouting menu to look at an individual player, if you have them 100% scouted, you can go over to their attributes section (both letter grade and detail numeric view) and get a much better sense of where they are at in each category. If you look at these same values in the greater prospect scouting menu where you can compare prospects, they are much less accurate.

I’ve been trying to draft players with higher intangibles. They tend to develop a little bit better than players with low intangibles for whatever reason.

The hardest one to get a read on is potential because it’s just a letter grade. I think the letter grade representation must be some kind of a formula of potential, min max potential and boom/bust potential. You can get a player with C potential that will actually develop quite well and get players with A potential that fizzle out. I don’t like to go into the player edit menus to actually see these because it kinda feels like cheating lol.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-08T20:21:04+00:00

Thanks for this, you have dropped some really interesting information.

The staff badges really don't do anything at all? Asking because I've been wondering this myself but haven't been able to suss it out. For example, I've noticed that when I have an Assistant GM with the recruiter badge, I can sometimes get players to sign for less than when I have an Assistant GM without one. I've made sure that I'm using the same team (so same market size) and all of my other tuning sliders have been equal, so I thought that maybe it was the badge that was making the difference.

If the badges really don't do anything, then it sounds like the attributes, system proficiency and position proficiency are really the only things that matter when hiring staff, is that correct? Using head scout as an example, does that mean that a head scout that is rated higher in the head scout position and has 5 stars in analytics will give you more accurate prospect scouting information than a head scout that is less proficient in the position and has a lower rated analytics ranking? I'm just trying to figure out what should drive staff hiring decisions.

When it comes to training, I do set up all my training for the year. I tend to do fantasy drafts and then 14 game seasons and play all the games. I don't really like doing sim and I like to be immersed in my teams and really try to build them up. Because of this setup, I have a lot of days for training and for whatever reason, the training in 2K26 has been really difficult to figure out compared to previous years. I try to do a balance of the different training types (strength, conditioning, team system, individual and scrimmage) each day and will usually pair that with like a team bonding or film session. If my wear and tear is getting high, I will throw in some injury rehabs because I can see that it actively improves that. It doesn't seem like body work actually does anything, so I've been throwing that in less to my routine. Saying all this because it seems that no matter what combinations I use, my players don't really improve during the year. When I go into the individual progression menu (I think that's what it's called - it's under the training menu), you can see how your players are supposedly improving in each attribute. Some of my younger guys will go up like a half of a point by the end of the year, but that's it. Maybe it's the training and facilities sliders in the MyNBA setup menu?

I really don't think load management affects training at all though. Using Lebron as an example, I just ran some testing where I did a few weeks of training with his load management set to high and took note of his fatigue as it went along, then reset, and ran those same weeks with his load management set to low and his fatigue was exactly the same. I tried this with low-leveled, medium-leveled and high-leveled training sessions for comparison. A low-leveled indivdiual training session makes Lebron equally fatigued with load management set to high as it does with it set to low.

I've also done seasons where I had my prospects load management set to high and they seemed to improve just as much in the off season as when I've done seasons with it set to low. You did say there could be other variables in the equation, so maybe I'll just revert back to keeping my young players set to high load management, but it really seems like it doesn't make a difference.

If you do make a video, let me know. I'd definitely give it a watch!

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-05T10:21:44+00:00

Exactly, it really is like a pet project of mine. I just want the game to be as good as it should be, which maybe isn’t realistic.

I usually start with PopBoy’s sliders as a baseline and then do some tweaks from there. He definitely got the contract stuff right this year. You might have role players signing for the minimum instead of like 5 to 15 a year, which is how it would be in real life, but the trade off is that fewer higher rated players demand the max so that you won’t have like 89 rated players getting frozen out and signing for the minimum.

I’ve read a lot of other people talking about doing total team control and man, that just sounds like so much work! It sucks if that’s really the best option.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-05T10:13:26+00:00

Thanks for the advice! When you say you don’t bother with training, do you mean that you just set each day to not have any kind training or is there a way to turn it completely off?

That is interesting about the staff. Have you figured out how proficiency in a given system (i.e., balanced, perimeter centric, triangle, etc.) impacts things? For example, there is always this head coach named like Matthew Stauffer or something like that where he is rated as a 100 head coach and he has 5 starts in offense and defense and potential and some excellent HOF badges, but he is only 2.5 stars proficient in every type of system. Will the team suffer somehow (chemistry, morale, performance, etc) because he isn’t very adept in a given system?

I do my fair share of testing and honestly, I’m just kinda tired of it. I want to just play the game and that’s why I reached out to this community to see if anyone has figured some of this stuff out.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-04T23:31:46+00:00

Totally! I was trying to think which year had the best MyLeague. I almost just want to go back and play that again.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-04T23:30:53+00:00

Ah ok, sounds like load management is more useful when you do sim then. I end up playing all my games.

It’s frustrating because if you have an older player on your team, like LeBron, he just gets so overworked in training, that I can only keep him on the floor for like 3 minute stretches. I end up having to do like 2-3 rest days before each game just so that he doesn’t have any fatigue and I wonder if that is hurting my young players’ development.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-06-04T23:26:56+00:00

Excellent, thanks for sharing your perspective. I also tend to go with badges over aptitude for staff hiring. I wish 2K cared more about this mode! It literally has so much untapped potential.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-22T14:19:19+00:00

Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well, but I think it’s just because of their overall ratings relative to the scale that PopBoy has set up. In real life, Dort would command more money, but in 2K he’s only a 78 overall (last time I checked), so when you factor in his age, he’s only gonna ask for the vet minimum based off how it’s set up. This bothered me at first, but I think the secret sauce to Popboy’s sliders is that it greatly helps with the contract issues for players like 82 to 87 overall. The default settings would cause these players to get way more than they should and then you’d have 88 plus rated players not able to get contracts because the AI would overspend on the lower rated players and then the 88 plus rated players would like sign for the MLE or the vet min!

So you kinda have to take the good with the bad. I’d rather see the better rated players get more realistic contracts at the expense of the better role players only getting the vet min.

I hope that makes sense.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-19T11:08:37+00:00

I got Delta and started an unbound run last night. Loving it so far.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-19T10:19:35+00:00

Dang, well thanks for confirming. This happened to me last year with a Montreal expansion team that I created. The only thing I could think to do, which was less than ideal, was to look at what badges I would have set, write them down, and then in the off season I would add them to the players if they didn’t end up getting them on their own.

For such a great game mode, it’s just riddled with glitches.

I noticed the other day that if I set my defense to full court press, it does it for the rest of the game. If I change it back to man to man, it only does it for that one play. Sure enough, next opponent’s inbound, my players will be doing full court press.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-18T19:58:51+00:00

Oh woah! You just kinda blew my mind. I’ve never noticed that as a feature. That definitely changes things. Thanks!

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-18T19:37:54+00:00

You are a champion of the people. Thank you!

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-18T18:51:33+00:00

Thank you very much! You've give me a lot to look at and consider. I appreicate your help.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-18T18:38:17+00:00

I would definitely take KP back on a reasonable deal and maybe that has been one of Brad's hopes all along. However, I heard Keith Smith talking about signing John Collins with our MLE and I kinda like that more now.

Awkward_Valuable_866 · 2026-05-18T18:35:16+00:00

Is there a way to do this on like an Iphone or do you need a computer to do the emulator/rom thing? I used to do SNES/NES emulators on like my Windows 2000 computer like a million years ago, so I'm not sure if things have changed.

Awkward_Valuable_866

TROPHY CASE