[aimlessgun]

Jordan in Converses looks more bizarre to me than Jordan wearing a different NBA team's jersey haha.


For all of you on 2k24 is the AI any better on defense than 23? Main things bothering me about 2k23:
-Too much respect for nonshooters, guys guarding a nonshooter don't camp the paint or roam enough.
-Most of the advanced defensive coaching settings just don't work. You can tell guys to hedge, switch on picks, etc and they just don't. In general there's almost no switching which is very inaccurate compared to the real NBA.
-Sometimes incredibly bizarre/dumb help and rotation movements that honestly seem like bugs they make so little sense.


Blazers/Bulls 2077-2078 - Rise of the Inverted Pick and Roll

2075 had ended with the Bulls finally putting together a championship run after getting a new coach and a big trade. However it had come courtesy of the Brooklyn Nets suffering a key injury. Just like Draymond Greene had boasted 50 years earlier during the Warrior's Curry era, Lamar Wright of the Nets put the NBA on notice: nobody had beaten this Nets team when they were healthy.

The Nets emphatically drove this home by winning in 2076 and 2077. 2076 even featured a 16-0 sweep of the playoffs, a feat not seen since the legendary Sharpe/Duncan/Jordan Blazers did it in 2036.

The Bulls were looking for a strategy to beat the Nets but no playbook, play assignments, or lineups they tried seemed to work. In 2076 they tried going smaller, playing star 6'8" SF/PF Dell Hayward at the 4, but to no avail. DPOY PF David Moore was able to keep up with him on the perimeter.

In general I've had a hard time getting value out of doing what is now standard in the real NBA: going smaller and shootier at PF. It's in large part to the defensive issues I mention at the start of this post: the CPU respects non-shooters too much so you don't get punished as hard as you should for just playing a 7 fter nonshooter at PF and crushing your opponents on the offensive glass if they dare to play a 6'8" guy.

The Bulls lost to the Nets 2-4 in 2077 just doing the traditional (in 2k) thing, with Haywood at SF and 2 bigs. Better than the prior year but still not good enough. In the 2077 offseason the Bulls lost their 2nd best big, Felder, due to financial constraints. This led them to once again trying Hayward at PF. And this time around they found a way for that to provide a meaningful edge.

Inverted pick and rolls, where the guard is setting the screen and a larger player is the ballhandler, have been pretty uncommon in the NBA but seem to be gaining popularity recently in real life. They are not something you generally get in NBA2k because the game does not give guards the 'PnR Roll Man' play assignment without human intervention.

Given Hayward's great passing skills and vision, it made sense to try and make this happen, so the backcourt of Byrd (PG) and two 6'6" SGs in Jermaine Johnston and Travis Becker all received this as one of their 2 plays (the other being PnR Ballhandler. We were going all in on PnR, even guard/guard PnRs).

In 2078 the inevitable showdown with the Nets in the ECF came to pass. After a rough game 1 where Chicago only scored 109 points to Brooklyn's 127, the new system started to pay dividends. In game 2, Dell Hayward went for 43/12/8. In game 3, Hayward was held to 19, but other guys got open and the team made 25 3s. The nice thing about guards as roll men is that they're very good at consistently popping for a good look at 3, and the Bulls took full advantage.

After game 1, the Bulls would score 130, 131, 137, 120, 120, 132 points, completely unheard of numbers against the Net's usually smothering defense. The Nets of course also had an amazing offense and pushed the series to 7 (the 137 point game was actually a 137-145 loss for the Bulls lol), but in game 7 the Bulls had the hot hand, and Dell Hayward posted a 37/14/13 line to lead them to victory. The Nets big 4 had finally lost when healthy! Thanks to the power of the inverted pick and roll.

In the finals a still young Blazers team even tried copying the Bulls strategy, but their level of playmaking and teamwork was not at the same standard and they missed the pass for the open 3 more often than not. The Bulls win the Finals 4-1. Everett Byrd takes finals MVP honors, though some think Dell Hayward should have gotten it as a reward for a better overall playoffs and being the MVP for the 'real finals' against the Nets.

It's the 2nd trophy of the Bulls 'Byrd Era', but pessimists think it may be their last, as starter Travis Becker will be lost for nothing in the offseason for financial reasons, and Byrd is starting to lose a step due to age.

The NBA will also move to universal playoff seeding next year, with all 16 playoff spots seeded purely by record, in an attempt to address the "ECF is the real finals" issue that has been ongoing for about 2 decades now.