NBA 2K15 MyLeague Sliders: Keeping Kevin Love in Cleveland

One of the most exciting aspects of NBA 2K15 is the customization offered to users in MyLeague. I advocate for sliders in sports games as much as possible, because every user is going to have their own interpretation of how something designed to mimic real life actually does it, and sometimes the default settings just aren’t tuned where they need to be (hello, Superstar Sim).

2015 is going to be a crucial summer for the NBA. Now that the new TV deal has been detailed, one would expect that owners, GMs, players, and agents alike are going to have a handle on how this influx of new money will affect the cap going forward, and players on short-term deals are going to have some tough decisions to make.

One such player is Kevin Love, who was traded to the Cavaliers this summer and, by some accounts, will opt out of his 2015–2016 player option and instead commit long-term to the Cavs. This decision is obviously huge for both the Cavaliers and the rest of the NBA, and I was curious to see how NBA2K15‘s MyLeague handles this scenario.

In all of the 30+ simulations I’ve done in NBA 2K15 to test this out, Love opted out of his contract every time. So far, so good.

However, on default settings, he only signed with the Cavs 4 times out of 10, often going to the highest bidder, including once with me offering him a max contract as the 76ers. Considering that, as recently as 2 months ago, his re-signing with the Cavs was considered a foregone conclusion, this was not nearly good enough.

MyLeague in NBA 2K15 has a few different sliders that pertain to this specific situation. There’s User Contract Negotiation, which presumably impacts how hard it is for the user teams to sign players, especially if they don’t meet their financial/ambition needs. There’s also CPU re-signing aggressiveness, which controls how forceful the AI is in retaining its own players. For the next set of tests, I moved both of these sliders all the way up. I gave Love a cursory maximum contract offer in each simulation in order to not remove a potential suitor out of the equation, though, using my Philadelphia 76ers, I didn’t have much faith he’d ever actually sign with me in these conditions.

With these two sliders turned to 100, Love signed with the Cavaliers in 6 of the next 10 simulations, and I did not sign Love once (most of the time he “mulled my offer,” but he declined my offer outright in 3 of the simulations).

The best way to consistently get Love to re-sign with the Cavaliers was to up the slider labeled “Player Non-Financial Ambition.” This slider reduces the affect that money has on a player’s decision-making, which is apt for the NBA, which is increasingly becoming less about money and more about situations (though money still plays a huge part in it). League rules restrict how much money teams can offer players, making relationship and roster building far more important than being able to throw money at a problem.

With this slider, the Contract Negotiation slider, and the CPU Re-sign Player Aggressiveness slider tuned all the way to 100, Love signed with the Cavaliers 8 out of 10 simulations, and rejected my offer outright 6 out of 10 times. Without editing Love’s individual ambitions (since it’s unreasonable to do this for the entire league), this was as close as I could get it, and these sliders (along with maximum Trade Negotiation difficulty) should be tuned to 100 in MyLeague for the best possible simulation of the off-season, assuming 2K Sports doesn’t tune this further.

Originally published at www.goodgamebro.com on October 16, 2014.