2k has been notoriously quiet about what exactly their attributes do and what their numbers really mean. NBA2kLab.com was started with the goal of shedding a little more light on these subjects so that our readers could have every advantage available to dominate online play. After months of research here are the top 5 little known advantages you can give yourself in NBA2k.
5. Plus 1s
Most 2k players would agree that 95 is the player rating cap for all non-superstar players and 96 is the cap for players at the superstar 1 rating. However this is not the case. Players who max every +1 attribute that can be earned by going to practices have the ability to get to 96 overall before superstar 1 and 97 overall as a superstar 1. There are 9 different attributes you will need to max to get to this next level.
Free Throw – Play the Free Throw Gold game in team practices. Players can only earn one free throw attribute per team practice. Different positions cap at different levels.
Reaction Time – Do the Gatorade Reaction Time Drill in the weight room. You can fail the drill and still get +1 each time, but only once per practice. The minimum amount of effort to still received gold “Doin’ Work” is get at least 6 on the first half of the drill, and 0 on the second half. This is the quickest way to complete the drill.
Offensive Consistency – We will go into further details in a moment, but you can only do this drill every other team practice, and it only gives +1 every other attempt. This one is a grind, but worth it.
Draw Foul, Shot IQ, Intangibles, Hands – You earn these by doing the tasks in practice. You can start the drill and cancel it to earn the +1. It takes three tasks to earn one of the attributes. We are looking into Shot IQ and Intangibles to see what they do exactly, but we have some information on Hands and Draw Foul. Draw Foul is not a sim stat, you will be more calls the higher it gets. We tested a player with 40 draw foul and they drew a foul on 17% of drives. We duplicated that player and gave them 99 draw foul and they drew a foul on 35.5% of their drives. While this is not crucial for Park, ProAm players should take advantage of draw foul to earn some free points at the line. This is a huge increase making it worth it to max. The Hands stat will help you to catch passes cleanly and not fumble them and will reduce the frequency of rebounds bouncing off your hands which can be incredibly frustrating.
Stamina and Hustle – You earn these two by doing the workouts in the weight room. You will get one of them for every fifth workout you complete. Increase stamina will let you sprint for a longer period of time and it will replenish your stamina bar more quickly. Hustle will help you with recovering loose balls and rebounding.
If you grind all of these stats to 99 you will see subtle improvements in your MyPlayer and you will hit that next overall rating.
4. Strength
One of the questions we get asked the most is “Is this attribute worth upgrading”? And most of the time that attribute is Strength. We are big fans of increasing strength and have been doing it for the past few 2ks. So, what does strength help with besides “making you stronger”?
The largest quantifiable increase was in made dunks/layups. For testing strength, we used a 6’6 player with slasher attribute caps and Hall of Fame posterizer dunking on a team of 7’3 glass cleaners with bronze rim protector. Any attempt that resulted in a missed shot due to a foul was thrown out. Below are the results from this test
| STRENGTH RATING | MADE DUNKS | MADE LAYUPS | MISSED ATTEMPTS |
| 70 | 26% | 25% | 49% |
| 65 | 20% | 26% | 54% |
| 60 | 19% | 22% | 57% |
| 55 | 15% | 26% | 59% |
| 50 | 5% | 29% | 66% |
As you can see, having higher strength greatly helps with the success of dunks and the chance of a shot going in. While it may appear that the number of made layups went down that is only due to the increased frequency of getting layup animations as opposed to dunk animations.
Strength also has benefits in areas that are more difficult to quantify.
Boxing out – Strength will help keep your man from slipping past you for the rebound. On the flip side, if you are boxed out with higher strength you have a better chance of doing a swim move to get passed your man.
Post moves/Post Defense – It is easier to back your man down or prevent your man from backing you down when you have higher strength. However, strength does not play a role in the success of a post move, except for Drop Stepper.
Screens – Strength did not help with setting screens, but it does help you run through them.
Defense – So far it seems like strength is great for bigs, and it is, but my personal favorite reason to max strength on guards is its role on defense. Even if you have the best reaction time/predictive skills in the world, sometimes the input lag will kill you in online modes. If you struggle with staying in front of more experienced players who are utilizing advanced dribble moves strength may be the solution to your problem. These dribble moves are often patterns that the users have memorized. Higher amounts of strength will lead to more bump animations against your matchup that will break the dribble chains and make it easier to check your man. Lateral quickness will often not be enough because it is 40 points slower than the speed of the dribbler; we will go more in depth on this later. We find the most consistently good defense is simply staying in front of your man, not reaching or jumping to try to block shots and getting bumps whenever possible.
3. Hot Zones
Here is our biggest impact advice for anyone wanting to bring their myPlayers to compete online at a high level. Get a hot zone on every section of your court. Since this is 2k, it has to be a little more complicated than it should be. It doesn’t seem to work the same for everyone, but in our experience, hot zones are shared across all your characters. If you make a new myPlayer your hot zones on your other myPlayers may disappear temporarily but can be regained easily by playing a career game.
Why should you get hot zones? (And avoid having cold zones) It will raise your shooting percentage and will get you more greens. Your shooting bar will be bigger in the hot zone as well.
With a non-badged player with an 80 overall standing three, we shot 500 standing, uncontested shots in each of a cold zone, hot zone, and in neither. Here are the results
| ZONE | MAKE % | GREEN % |
| Hot | 70.4% | 70% |
| Normal | 62.6% | 29.8% |
| Cold | 40% | 0% |
As you can see, the increase in makes and greens makes it completely worth it to set a hot zone.
There are 5 zones on the perimeter, 5 from mid-range, 3 around the hoop, and 1 zone under the hoop where you can get hot zones. These will cover the entire court.
In order to set a hot zone, you must hit approximately 12 shots in the zone and shoot higher than 40%. In our experience, if you have a hot zone and play several games without hitting a shot in that area, you will lose the hot zone. I normally use my sharpshooter to set the hot zones by playing on rookie difficulty and 12 minute quarters. It normally only takes around four games to set them all as it’s easy to hit 60 field goals while shooting over 40%. After they are set, just start a career game on another character and they will copy to that character as well. You don’t even have to play the full game. You can sim to the end and they will still get the hot zone.
2. Intangibles
Another common request that we could not find anywhere on the internet was figuring out what the purpose of intangibles was. We had heard a lot of speculation about the stat simply being a placeholder that would allow the developers at 2k to manipulate overall ratings typically in MyTeam. There was some evidence to back this up due to the significant effect in overall rating the stat had. The difference between 25 and 99 represents 4 points to a player’s overall rating.
However, we were able to prove that the stat does have a more significant effect on gameplay. We used 2 identical players with only their intangibles separating them, one at 99 and the other at 25. We then turned our game speed all the way up to 100 and our quarter length down to 1 minute. We then began taking as many buzzer beaters as possible. We found that the player with 99 intangibles made over 30% more buzzer beaters at the end of a quarter and clutch shots at the end of a close game.
We also noticed that the player with high intangibles was capable of getting different animations at the end of the game to create space. The player attempted quick turnaround jumpers and craftier tap ins around the rim.
1. Offensive Consistency
Offensive consistency is without a doubt the requested test we have received the most. Clearly this is due to the significant amount of effort involved with raising the rating. This stat also had a bit of a mysterious following with it as many YouTubers have made very large claims about the difference it makes. After a number of different tests trying to break down what the stat does we were able to come up with a concrete example of at least one of the benefits.
For this test it is important to understand the different levels of “hot” a player can be. As a player begins to heat up they will hit an initial hot stage before the red ring below the player is visible. When a player hits that second level of being hot that is when you see the red ring. The first level of being hot was good for a 5 point boost to the following categories: Shot Close, All midrange ratings, All 3 point ratings, Shot IQ, Free Throw, Layup and Standing Layup, Ball Control, All passing attributes, Hands, All post attributes, Offensive and Defensive Rebounding and all defensive attributes. The second level of being hot provided a 9 point boost to the same categories.
We used Paul George, default offensive consistency of 95, and a modified version of Paul George with only the Offensive Consistency stat changed to a 40. We began tracking how many 3 point attempts in took to get to each level of being hot. With 40 offensive consistency it took Paul 3 shots to hit the initial heat stage and 4 makes to get to the second level. Compare this to 95 offensive consistency where Paul become hot after the first make and hit the second level after the third make.
Next, Paul was able to retain his heat despite missing shots at the higher rating. At 40 offensive consistency as soon as Paul missed his level of heat would fall. At 95 offensive consistency Paul was able to miss 4 shots before the rating fell.
We are not convinced that we have completely solved offensive consistency and think that the same patterns may apply to myPlayer grand badges. We have not been able to prove this yet though.
So alright sports gamers, hope this article was able to help you guys out, shed some light on things you didn’t know and answer some of the questions you guys have had for a while now about 2k. Be sure to go on over to NBA2Klab.com, these guys do amazing work for the NBA 2K community. Stay tuned for more NBA 2K17 to come here at Sports Gamers Online, thank you all for watching and be good yall