2K today announced the full roster of cover athletes for NBA 2K22!

Global phenomenon and two-time NBA All-Star, Luka Dončić, graces the Standard Edition and Cross-Gen Digital Bundle, while a trio of the NBA’s most impactful big men – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dirk Nowitzki, and Kevin Durant – feature in a premium, NBA 75th Anniversary Edition, showcasing how each of these athletes changed the game.

Featuring best-in-class visual presentation and player AI, historic teams, and a wide variety of hoops experiences, NBA 2K22 puts the entire basketball universe in the player’s hands.

Build out and solidify a championship-caliber staff, define the roles you’ll need to fill, and learn how training can make or break a title run in NBA 2K22.

Below, we’ll detail what it means to build out and solidify a championship-caliber staff, the roles you’ll need to fill, and how training can make or break a title run. Without further ado, let’s get into the good stuff!

MySTAFF

Back in 2K14, we took basketball franchise gameplay to the next level with MyGM, allowing players to fully take on the role of running an NBA Franchise from the ground up. In 2K20, we pushed forward in the next step of evolution to MyGM 2.0, but we’ve still had our eye on how we can improve the experience for users, while staying true to the heart and vision of having the best sim franchise experience possible.

The more we thought about it, the more it became clear that we needed to improve the depth of not just the GM, but those around them that make any organization run – the staff. We see in other parts of the game that players love the depth and customization that basketball players can get when it comes to their attributes, tendencies, and badges. We already see it from our brilliant community with the time and effort they put into making custom rosters and draft classes, yet even if they wanted to, they face difficulties when molding a MyNBA Staff in the same way.

As such, we redesigned how your staff works from the ground up. New attributes, more than double the staff badges, and a slew of new roles. We’ve completely reimagined this aspect of the mode and are proud to show off the newest addition – MySTAFF.

Staff Overview

First, let’s take a look at the new Staff Carousel. We’ve kept a similar format to help make sure it still feels intuitive to those familiar with the old system, but I’m sure a few things jump out in the above screenshot where you’ll notice everyone listed here is a coach, as well as ‘Coaching’ listed in the upper portion of the screen. We’ve greatly expanded the staff for every team, so now you have four departments with positions you’ll need to fill:

• Front Office (Governor, GM, Assistant GM, CFO)
• Coaching (Head Coach, Shot Doctor, Bigman Coach, Post Defense Coach, Perimeter Defense Coach, Guard Guru, Wing Whisperer)
• Scouting (Head Scout, 4 Domestic Scouts, 2 Foreign Scouts)
• Sports Medicine (Team Doctor, Strength Trainer, Stamina Trainer, Sports Psych, Sports Science, Physio, Sleep Doctor)

The Front Office needs every position filled, and you need a head of each department. Beyond that, you’ll have a cap of 17 total staff positions you can fill, in addition to balancing the staff budget.

You’ll have to determine what exactly is most important to your franchise, because similar to real life, franchises will have their strengths and weaknesses. Will you opt for a revolutionary training team with shades of the Phoenix Suns, able to mitigate injuries and give a second wind to older players, or perhaps focus more on a brilliant coaching staff like Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs who impacts what happens on the court? Do you want to try and fish for the next great international player, or perhaps forgo international scouting entirely? These are all questions that you’ll be able to answer directly, with the freedom to make the team that you want to see.

If this looks a little overwhelming, don’t worry! We also make sure to give you a general evaluation of each department, so you can understand the team’s strengths and weaknesses, and give suggestions on where and when to fill!

Attributes and Badges

In addition to the changes to the departments, you’ll notice that we now have a new spread of attributes available. One of the things we love most at 2K is watching how a story can unfold – from the sculpted experience of MyCAREER, to the more organic sandbox nature of MyNBA. We think it’s compelling when what we’re playing is more than just numbers on a spreadsheet, but an interesting narrative that comes to life and really makes for an engrossing experience. To help facilitate this, we’ve made a lot of the attributes that go into Staff more universal, so it’s possible to have a staffer that you can freely put in different departments and watch them grow.

As an example, we have the new attribute Charisma. This has almost no effect for a CFO buried in spreadsheets, but is essential for a department head, GM, or assistant GM. Money Sense would be the prime attribute for a CFO, but it also is relevant for a GM attempting not to get fleeced in a trade deal. We have a glossary to fully explain what each of the attributes entail, but the general gist is that it will be much easier for staff members to transfer across multiple departments and jobs, especially based on what the player feels their franchise needs.

In the above screenshot, we can see that when attempting to hire a new Strength Trainer, the default sort is by Sports Medicine, which is the best attribute for a strength trainer (and most other Sports Medicine staff). You can then scroll over and see how the rest of their attributes stack up, or get a quick look at how many badges they have. We’ve done our best to help make the system more robust, while giving players the tools to get the information they need to make a smart decision. And if you want an expanded view, we can pull up the staff card!

Deep Dive

MySTAFF is a dramatic change to how you approach a franchise in the big picture, and the staff you have will have immense effects both in terms of how your team performs in a given year, as well as the direction your franchise takes in the long run. To take a deeper dive, let’s take a look at the Sports Medicine department, as well as the various jobs found within:

• Team Doctor – Impacts all of the other Sports Medicine jobs, and in the event of a vacancy in the position, uses the Team Doctor’s attributes and badges at half capacity.
• Strength Trainer – Assists in the development of strength and vertical.
• Stamina Trainer – Assists in the development of conditioning, stamina, and hustle.
• Sports Psych – Impacts team chemistry and morale; without the presence of a strong Sports Psych, it’s possible teams can tailspin into a negative cycle of morale and team chemistry drops.
• Sports Scientist – Essential to the prevention of injuries, they help both give benefits in terms of player durability on individual body parts as well as reducing the chance to be injured.
• Physio – The one that helps players rehab from injuries.
• Sleep Doctor – Helps manage the health and wellness of players, allowing them to better manage season fatigue.

All of the jobs have been designed to be important and leave the player to make meaningful choices. Do you have a young and healthy team, and prefer to focus on having strong trainers? Or do you have a roster of older vets and the focus is more on injury prevention and mitigation?   These are questions that you’ll have to ask and evaluate yearly as your lineup changes.

Another point to consider is the fact that Staff will grow and develop, as well. Attributes will generally grow on their own over time with a slight lean towards the job they’re currently performing, but based on the influence of staff members around them, staffers will be more or less likely to acquire badges over time. Any staff can theoretically become another staff job type, especially if they have core attributes that align well with their new jobs. Badges will come with time, so if you think a staffer has the attributes for a key position you’d like to see down the line, you can adjust them freely and see them grow and flourish into their new position the way you imagine it.

Updated Staff Card

Our roster team has done an awesome job of trying to best fill out real-life staff members in the roster with appropriate attributes and badges, to help bring the authenticity of the real-life NBA to you. As one of the most illustrious coaches of our era, we can see that Gregg Popovich is both a perfect example of how staff should progress and an example of a real-life story that we want to see unfold in the new MySTAFF System. In 1994 as the Spurs’ GM, he ended up installing himself as the Head Coach and flourished into one of the all-time greats. Able to handle everything both on and off the court, Pop has numerous badges across multiple job types, so no matter whom he’s staffed in, he’ll likely have the attributes to make it work, and likely a bevy of silver, gold, and hall of fame badges to bolster his abilities.

In this image we can also get a look at the overview, allowing you to see highlights of attributes, badges and their aptitude towards various jobs – department heads at the top, followed by front office, followed by all of the collective sub-jobs grouped together by their old, simple names (assistant coach, scout and trainer). You can even delve further to get more information on what staff can do, and everything you see here is also available for change in Edit Staff so roster makers can continue to adjust and iterate to make your ideal MySTAFF.

Training

In addition to MySTAFF, our other flagship feature for 2K22 is the improvements to team and player training. For a long time, we’ve had some awesome ways to custom-tailor how players would progress, by giving them archetypes and allowing training under the hood to help guide and direct them so players could feel the impact of choosing how player training would develop. However, there were a few hiccups – it was tough to get to the nifty menu where you could determine the player type and position, and managing training and rest felt difficult as it was never quite clear how team fatigue was balanced against training. In addition, it would also be difficult to truly emulate the real-life NBA of having coaches running teams and offenses with a specific style in mind, and in the end we felt that we could, and would do better.

Prep Hub

First, to help assist with training is a new menu called the Prep Hub. This is designed to be a one-stop shop for anyone that is looking to try and adjust team training and fatigue, while having a mind towards the scouting report of your next opponent. You can also see the team proficiency, which is a simplified way of explaining how well the current players are able to play and adapt to the Head Coach’s current system proficiency. We wanted to make a deliberate choice to try and make play styles matter, so having a coach specialized in 7 Seconds or Less run and gun offenses will have to adapt to a roster with taller, more defensive oriented players. This also helps stress the importance of having your MySTAFF built to suit the needs of your team, as you may want more trainers and coaches depending on how your team proficiency is, and how hard you need to work to learn.

Team Training

Next up, we can see the planned training for the next three weeks. There’s a snapshot in the lower right to let you know about the team’s current state and fatigue, as well as how many players are injured or currently on load management. For every team, the Head Coach will generate a training schedule according to their beliefs and interests of what they think will be the best. From there, it becomes a balancing act to make sure that players have a high Game Fitness, or else they’ll be sluggish and have lower attributes and lower energy available for the actual games. It will be on the player to adjust the workload as necessary, especially for teams with deep playoff ambitions to make sure team fatigue doesn’t creep too high during the regular season.

You’ll be able to see a brief description for every practice type, as well as the intensity, fatigue, and injury risk for each practice. Players will also be able to make ‘smart’ decisions for themselves, so if players are set to have load management and the fatigue hit or injury risk is too high, they’ll opt to do lower-stress practice instead and continue to train towards their ideal player type.

Individual Training

When looking at Individual training, now it’s easier than ever to choose a player’s ideal skill training focus. This will affect all individual training and will help make sure that a player’s attributes grow in that direction over time. A player’s fatigue, injury risk, and load management are all visible in the spreadsheet now. As such, it’s easier than ever to help guide MyNBA fans into knowing the state of the roster and figure out the ideal training path for all players on their team.

Compact Spreadsheets

We’ve been hard at work at improving one of the most essential parts of the franchise experience – the spreadsheets! Now across the mode, we’re using a different style to help have much tighter, more condensed spreadsheets. This means the places where you want to see a lot of info – the roster, the coach gameplan, the box score – will now display more than double the lines previously. We think that this is honestly one of the greatest possible improvements we could make to the mode, and will make the average quality of life for any MyNBA player go up. We hope you love the new look as much as we do!

Conditional Coaching

Another new feature we are really excited for is Conditional Coaching, which gives power users the ability to help give coaching directives while they simulate games. Using symbolic logic, you’ll be able to input powerful commands that will look for specific conditions in the game, and if they occur, make coaching changes accordingly. As an example, one of our pre-set simple conditions is ‘Garbage Time’ – all you have to add is a point value, like 10. Once set, it makes it so that if in the fourth quarter, if the point differential is 10 (up or down) and there’s only a little bit of game time left, you sub out the starters and get in the bench to help make sure you can play rookies and get them extra game time when the game has been decided. We’re eager to see how much our hardcore fanbase will love the ability to truly sim the way they want to play.

New Pre-Built Teams

In the interest of making the customization of new leagues easier and to give some new fun challenges for our players, we’ve also rolled out three new pre-built custom teams, complete with logos, uniforms and arenas! The new teams in the lineup are:

• Bronx Brawlers
• Honolulu Breeze
• Omaha Airmen

You won’t have to do anything crazy to see them in action; just opt to customize the league and add them as pre-built teams like you have in the past, or add them as expansion teams down the line.

In Summary 

We’ve got big changes to MySTAFF and Training to add new layers of depth to any type of MyNBA you create, plus better spreadsheets across the mode, new pre-built teams to play with, greater control over the way your teams run via simulator, and a countless number of bug fixes and other minor improvements to continue to improve your experience this year!

This year, NBA 2K22 will offer three editions of the game available on digital and physical formats: Standard Edition, a Cross-Gen Digital Bundle and a special NBA 75th Anniversary Edition:

• The Standard Edition will be available for $59.99 on previous-gen platforms (PS4, Xbox One consoles, Nintendo Switch, and PC) and $69.99 on new-gen consoles (PS5 and Xbox Series X|S);
• The Cross-Gen Digital Bundle ($79.99) will grant players access to the Standard Edition across previous- and new-gen within the same PlayStation and Xbox consoles;
• NBA 2K22 NBA 75th Anniversary Edition ($99.99) will be available for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Dual-gen access is included for both the Cross-Gen Digital Bundle and NBA 75th Anniversary Edition for the PS4/PS5 and Xbox One/Xbox Series X|S platforms and provides a version of the game on each console generation within the same console family. The NBA 75th Anniversary Edition for Nintendo Switch will only be available on digital format in the EMEA region.

The NBA 75th Anniversary Edition celebrates three of the league’s most iconic big men who revolutionized the league over its 75 years:

• Hall of Famer, six-time NBA Champion and six-time MVP, and all-time NBA scoring leader, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a legend who still influences today’s game, from his patented Skyhook to his activism on social issues;
• 14-time All-Star, NBA Champion and MVP, Dirk Nowitzki, embodies not only the global expansion of basketball but also the evolution of the game itself as the protoypical sharpshooting big man;
• 11-time All-Star, league MVP and two-time NBA Champion, Kevin Durant, a legend in his own right and known for his one-of-a-kind presence in the league appears for the third time as an NBA® 2K cover athlete.

The NBA 75th Anniversary Edition and Cross-Gen Digital Bundle feature cover artwork painted by Atlanta-based artist, Charly Palmer, whose work in fine art is defined by complex compositions and a unique technique and style. Palmer’s work is exhibited across the nation; he is most recently known for his “Civil Rights” series of paintings and compositions titled “America Must Change,” which made waves as TIME Magazine’s cover in July 2020.

In North America, players can purchase a special version of the Standard Edition featuring six-time WNBA All Star and WNBA Champion, Candace Parker, on the cover and available exclusively through GameStop and EB Games. Parker’s appearance is a milestone for NBA 2K: the first female cover athlete in the history of the franchise. The Chicago Sky star’s cover feature is the latest step in NBA 2K’s ongoing initiatives to feature women prominently in the game. In Japan, players can also purchase a special version of the Standard Edition that features Washington Wizards Rui Hachimura, a rising star who was the first Japanese player to be drafted in the first round in 2019 and first Japanese player to reach the NBA Playoffs.

2K will also be releasing additional announcements about NBA 2K22 in the coming weeks, including first looks at features, the soundtrack reveal, live service updates, and much more. With ever-expanding content and one of the most passionate hoops communities, basketball never stops in NBA 2K.

All editions of NBA 2K22 are currently scheduled for worldwide release on September 10, 2021 and are available for pre-order today.