

The NBA regular season doesn’t tip off until October 17, but basketball fans have another date circled on their calendar a month prior on September 19. That is the release date for NBA 2K18, the most popular NBA video game on the market and one that appears to have made some significant upgrades over the past year.

In 2K18, the graphics look cleaner and the game modes offer much more realism when it comes to how free agency and the NBA Draft are experienced. While all of that figures to be something gamers will all appreciate, there is one thing that, no matter how much work is put into fine-tuning the system, they’ll never please everyone with.

That would be player ratings, which 2K Sports has slowly been letting trickle out via NBA players’ own social channels with first looks at them in the game. Ratings are debated by fans and the players themselves, with some, like John Wall, getting upset with the folks over at 2K over a perceived slight with their rating. There is significant method to the madness when it comes to 2K’s player ratings, and it is all part of a process that has been revamped and improved — much like the rest of the game — by Mike Stauffer, a former 2K player that now heads up their ratings team.

Stauffer spoke to Bleacher Report’s Jordan Zirm recently about his incredible journey from 2K enthusiast to 2K ratings guru, which began in 2011 during the NBA lockout, when the game could not include the rookie class due to the stoppage. So, Stauffer, at the time an elementary school teacher, created the rookie class with his own ratings and it got downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Fellow gamers weren’t the only ones to take notice, as 2K quickly reached out to Stauffer.



That transition began in an unlikely place: the expiration of the NBA collective bargaining agreement. The NBA lockout ahead of the 2011-12 season not only chopped a handful of games off the regular-season schedule, but it prevented every rookie who was drafted that summer from appearing in NBA 2K. Frustrated, Stauffer populated each rookie himself, turning his creations into a downloadable roster update available to anyone who played the game. It blew up. Stauffer’s rookie class was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making enough of a splash for 2K to reach out to him and bring him in for an interview. And that was that.

Stauffer has worked on the 2K ratings team since prior to the launch of 2K15, and his influence has been noticeable. As Zirm notes, prior to Stauffer’s arrival, 20 factors were calculated together to create an overall rating and that has since jumped to 45 with Stauffer involved, as they try to bring in things like NBA.com’s hustle stats and others to create a better rating system that weighs the abilities and impacts of role players and specialists better.

“It’s not like as the ratings guy I say, ‘Oh, Kyrie? He’ll be a 90,'” Stauffer says. “We rate all the individual attributes, and whatever we put through our formulas that we constantly tweak gives us an overall value. I’m proud of what the results are. I think we get a pretty accurate representation of how good these players are and their different skill sets.”

This is why, despite Mia Khalifa’s best efforts in bribery, John Wall’s rating will remain a 90 until he, statistically, makes the improvements to earn the boost in Stauffer’s system. No one is pleased all the time and players will almost always want to have a better rating than they get — part of being a pro athlete is having the self-confidence to believe you’re better than you may actually be — but generally, the ratings get it pretty right and the ever-improving accuracy of those ratings can be traced back to what started as an elementary school teacher’s passion project in the midst of an NBA lockout.