Next-gen NBA 2K21 releases Thursday for both PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, and while this may not cover every last detail on the plethora of options available to GMs starting a new MYNBA GM career, this will cover what my approach (or should it be, MyApproach?) will be for next-gen NBA 2K21 to at least get you to a strong starting point.
I’ll follow-up here later with more suggestions, and be sure to check out my new NBA 2K21 MyNBA next-gen streaming series that will start sometime this week.
Choosing a Team
While it may seem obvious, this is actually one of the harder choices for me. I don’t like to just pick my favorite team, and even while I see the realism in choosing a team that did actually hire a new GM for this season, that’s not always an ideal fit either as often times that new GM has already made changes to the team by the time the game releases. Having said all that, here is how I decide on a team:
- I load up the NBA standings from last season as well as the current NBA GMs list from Wikipedia.
- I eliminate from my choices any GM who has been in the GM position less than 4 years.
- I then look at the remaining GMs–those who have been with their team 4 years or more–and compare them against the standings from the previous season.
- If a GM’s team had a losing record and/or did not make the playoffs, they are added to the pool of potential teams that I see as being a realistic fit to be taken over.
Note: One caveat to this is that if a team has been a dominant winner over the years–such as the Warriors, Spurs, etc.–I give those GMs a pass as they’ve earned it, at least in my eyes.
Suggestion: Don’t just pick the worst team; it’s far more of a challenge to pick a team closer to .500 as you have a number of different directions you could go, and you likely don’t have a top-3 pick in the upcoming draft.
Played vs Simulated Games Schedule
I have often said that NBA 2K is the best sports video game available (honorable mention to Out of the Park Baseball and Football Manager), but perhaps the only blemish on this series is that we do not have the ability to carryover our saves from one year’s release to the next. With an 82-game schedule as well as playoffs, this is a must and is something I hope to see soon in this great series.
Having said all that, you could certainly just play every single game and perhaps even make it through a handful of seasons, but that can be tough, especially if you’re someone who places a huge focus on team building. Here are a few played vs simulated schedules you could try:
| Regular Season | Playoffs | Total Played Games | ||
| Extreme | Played Games | 100% (82 games) | 100% (16-28 games) | 98-126 |
| Simulated Games | 0% | 0% | ||
| 16-Game Schedule | Played Games | ≈20% (16 games) | 4 (choose one per series) | 16-20 |
| Simulated Games | ≈80% (66 games) | Simulate the rest | ||
| 32-Game Schedule |
Played Games | ≈40% (32 games) | 8-12 (choose 2-3 per series) | 32-42 |
| Simulated Games | ≈60% (50 games) | Simulate the rest | ||
| Staggered* | Played Games | 10% in season 1 and add 10% each season after that | Same ratio as regular season | Varies |
| Simulated Games | 90% in season 1 and subtract 10% each season after that | Same ratio as regular season | ||
| Quick | Played Games | ≈12% (10 games) | 4 (choose one per series) | 10-14 |
| Simulated Games | ≈88% (72 games) | Simulate the rest | ||
| Full-Sim | Played Games | 0% | 0% | 0 |
| Simulated Games | 100% (82 games) | 100% (16-28 games) |
*For staggered, you might put a cap on the played game’s percentage, such as 50%. This means that once you hit season 5, you’ll always play 50% of the regular season and playoffs from that point on.
League Settings
You could spend hours in these menus, so let me make a suggestion: Don’t.
Instead trust the experts, that is someone who’s already spent the necessary time to setup a really strong MyNBA experience. I would recommend checking out the great work of schnaidt1 over on Operation Sports. I can’t guarantee schnaidt1 will have something up on the day of release, but you could at least use their current-gen settings as a starting point. Once schnaidt1 has their settings loaded for next-gen, it’s easy to just load them straight into your MyNBA setup.
I will follow-up with more suggestions later, but this should at least get you started with a strong approach and get you to gaming quicker.