After learning how to set up a fantasy draft in NBA 2K23, you may be looking for some tricks and pointers as to how to have as much success as you possibly can with your personally selected team of stars.
The biggest determining factor of your immediate fantasy draft success will be how the actual draft itself unfolds for you. Being able to put together as good of a team as possible will not only help you win games in the short term, but it will also give you a good foundation to keep your team dangerous and competitive as you advance through building your team across multiple seasons.
But it’s not as simple as drafting the highest overall player that’s available to you every time your pick comes up. There are more factors to consider when assembling your roster, such as the players’ current age, their individual strengths on the court, and the contracts that come with said players.
That’s why in today’s post we’ll go over the best tips for the fantasy draft in NBA 2K23.
Age
When playing just one game or even just one season, a player’s ratings will be all that matters while their age will be almost entirely irrelevant. But often when players do a fantasy draft in NBA 2K23, it’s with the intention of building and managing their team through multiple NBA seasons.
Due to this, a player’s age is a very important factor to consider when drafting your team’s roster. This is because the older a player is, the less remaining time you’ll have with them on your team before they retire compared to younger players in the league.
Youth is also an advantage when drafting players because younger players will have more time to further develop their skills as well as this development takes place at a faster rate than their older counterparts.
Not only will older players progress at a much slower rate than younger players would, but they’ll also have to deal with regression in their skills every year they get older.
Obviously, a player’s current age is not the only factor and you should also be taking their current ratings into account when deciding who you want to draft, but it is still an important factor that you should make an effort not to forget about.
Contract and Salary
Another important factor that can sometimes be easy to overlook when drafting players for your team’s roster is how much you’ll be paying that player.
This is because NBA teams have a salary cap that they must stay under, meaning the combined salaries of all the players on a team may not exceed a certain number. Due to this, having multiple extremely highly paid players on your team can make it very hard to get talented players around them as you begin to run out of cap space.
Even if a player isn’t in the top tier of player salaries, it’s important to make sure they aren’t being overpaid compared to what they’re able to contribute to the team, as similar to having multiple max contract players it can often waste cap space and hamstring your ability to build a talented well-rounded team.
You can see a player’s contract details from the “Draft Pool” screen, where the years remaining on their contract will be listed in the “Years” column and their yearly salary will be listed in the “Wage” column.
Before you commit to drafting a player for your team, make sure to take a look at the contract they’ll be on to ensure that they won’t be raking in too much of your salary cap and preventing you from building a fully well-rounded team.
Trades
With the time in between picks in the draft, especially if you catch an unlucky roll of the dice in the serpentine draft order, there may be times when you find yourself in danger of losing out on the ability to draft a player that you deem essential to your team’s success.
In times like this, it’s important to remember you can make trades to move around the draft board. If you find yourself many picks away from your next selection and the player you want seems like they may be going off the board soon, you can trade later picks for the pick of a team in front of you in order to move up and ensure you’re able to get your guy.
On the flip side, if you get to your draft pick and don’t see any options that you deem worthy of selection at the current pick, you can also try to trade that pick away in order to load up on later and/or future picks that can give you more flexibility in the future.
Making draft trades isn’t a necessity, and a poor trade can even hurt your team in both the short and long term, but it is an asset to remember you have at your disposal for when you see fit.
Draft to Match Your Ability
Most NBA 2K23 players have various aspects of the game that they excel at as well as aspects they struggle with. This is why it’s important to make sure the players you’re drafting have skills that you’ll be able to utilize on the court.
This is especially important as you get later in the draft and are filling out role players and bench guys. This is because these players will by and large be lowly rated with maybe a couple of skills that stand out.
If these players’ abilities line up with your abilities at the game, you’ll be able to get more out of them and get them to play above their talent level due to your own skills as a player.
When teams make deep championship runs, it’s often thanks to big contributions from role players stepping up and delivering big in the moment. If you’re able to get this effect from drafting players that fit your own abilities, you’ll be starting one step ahead.
Final Word
The fantasy draft is a fun way to add a unique spin to the experience of managing and building a team in NBA 2K23.
Thanks to today’s article, you now have some extra tips and knowledge to utilize in the mode in order to have as much fun and success with it as possible.
If you were wondering about drafting players in MyLeague/MyGM mode, we’ve also got a guide on how to download a custom draft class that really takes realism to the next level. Be sure to check it out!
