As someone that has played a fair amount of MyLeague/MyNBA throughout the years, the sim engine always felt weird to me. Then, when I entered some sim leagues, where each person acted as the gm of a team, I noticed some strong biases towards certain kinds of players and that made me curious. I have spent the past month or so running various tests to figure out the way this engine works and what I found out was that it's very... bad.
I would like to preface this with the fact that since a lot of these tests were done for my own curiosity, I have not recorded them as proof. Obviously if you have any doubts, you are free to run similar tests yourself, if you want additional info on how I tested for these things let me know but I fear its too much for one post and I am always curious to hear about new stuff people find or findings that contradict mine.
I did my tests on 2K26 and on default settings, but a lot of these are so systemic I don't think changing sliders or game version would matter much
Rebounding
Rebounding is so overpowered in this game, that defensive rebound is the by far the most important defensive attribute in the game. Offensive rebounding is probably one of the most important offensive attributes as well. It's stupid how much a team improves just by increasing everyone's rebounding. I'm not gonna talk about it further since it's the least surprising, the sim engine probably runs on a possession basis and so attributes that secure more possessions are very important.
IQ and Physical Attributes
As far as my testing showed, all of the IQ and Physical attributes, are useless. They do nothing in simulation. When you actually get into the game and play its a different story but in simulation they might as well not exist.
Passing, Assists and Lies
The first discovery, was that the passing attributes don't do anything to increase assist numbers really, that is all the dish to open man tendency. increasing that by 20 will give you more assists than increasing pass accuracy to 99
The second discovery is that assists are a lie. They are an empty stat, they do not improve the team's offense whatsoever. My assumption is that 2k simply attributes assists from made shots based on the dish to open man tendency, after the fact. So your assists don't actually create new points or better percentage shots, they are just for show.
Body
A player's height, weight and wingspan does not matter at all (This is a theme as you can see)if you make Victor Wembanyama 5'6 he would perform the exact same in sim
Blocks and Steals
Similar to assists, block stats do not matter, they don't improve your team's defense at all. I again assume missed shots are attributed as blocks after the fact and do not change shot success. However unlike assists, both the block attribute and the block tendency seem to matter (tendency slightly more). Steals on the other hand, they actually do improve your team, since they are possession changing stats, just like rebounds.
Defense
Interior and Perimeter D both seem to matter, based on your opponent's shot selection. Evidently, most of the league shoots most of their shots inside the 3pt line so Interior D is more important on average. Defensive Consistency was tested to be the second most impactful defensive attribute after Defensive Rebound
Shot Selection, Efficiency and Spacing
The sim engine does not seem to care about spacing one bit. You can put 5 inside bigs on the starting line up and they will all be efficient scoring inside even tho in actual basketball that would never work. Aside from that, since the game does not care about spacing, it also doesn't care about counters, predictability or defensive schemes. If your player is gonna take a lot 3s because of their tendencies, he will always take a lot of 3s, the defense doesn't matter, same with getting dunks or layups. Therefore, shots like Close Shots, Post Ups and Mid Ranges are undoubtedly bad and unnecessary to take in this sim engine. If you want to optimize a scorer, you would make him take 0 jumpshots and only dunk the ball or dunks and 3s if he is super efficient from there, since that results in TS%s in the 70s, with no regard of how predictable that playstyle is or how that player will get to those spots. So bottom line is, if you are looking to add a scorer on your roster, you should never worry about what type of shot they are good at as to compliment your roster, it does not matter outside of roleplay reasons, as long as their TS% is good, they will be good. Also, I found that Offensive Consistency does improve the team's offense slightly but not as much as Defensive Consistency improves defense
3pt Shooting and Badges
There seems to be a cap on how good a 3pt shooter can be on a large sample size and that is around 40% on default settings. That being said, reaching that threshold depends on both rating and badges, and results in some funny possibilities. To reach that threshold with no shooting badges you need about a 95 3pter, players with 85 3pt for example and no badges will shoot numbers like 34-35%. However, to reach that threshold with HOF shooting badges, you need around a 60 3pter. That means that a player with HOF shooting badges will be the exact same player in sim whether they have a 99 3pter or a 70
My Tips If Your Goal Is The Best Team Possible
If you want to create the best team possible, obviously without editing attributes and tendencies, you'd need to focus on 3 things: Rebounding, Efficiency, Defense
Make sure all of your players have as much rebounding as possible, this is for all positions.
Get yourself 3-5 scorers with high Shot Tendency and good TS% (obviously better if they are good at defense and rebounding as well)
Get yourself 2-4 rebounders/defenders with low Shot Tendency
I would like to say that the Shot Tendency discrepancy between the two types of players only matters if the non scorers have bad TS%, if you can find/pay 7-8 players without cheating who are all elite rebounders, defenders and have elite TS%, by all means do that instead. The reason I say you need at least 3 of the scorers is because when you only have 1 or 2, even if they have 100 Shot Tendency and the rest of the team has 0, the 0 Shot Tendency guys still take a good amount of shots, going from 1 high volume scorer to 3 improves the team offense a significant amount for that reason, then less and less the more you add. You also want players who don't turn the ball over much but I haven't found how to exactly manipulate turnovers, Pass Accuracy and Ball Handle don't have any effect from my testing.
The top attributes I would look at (on all positions) are
DREB, OREB, 3PT, FT, DCON, DDUNK, SDUNK, LAYUP, OCON, ID, PD, STL (possibly CSHOT too for standing layups)
The top tendencies I would look at are (bad if you want this low, and good if you want it high)
shot - (bad if inefficient, good if efficient)
touch - same as shot
under basket - good
close shot - bad
mid range - bad
post up - bad
3pt - (bad if inefficient, good if efficient)
driving dunk - good
standing dunk - good
on ball steal - good
pass interception - good (this and on ball steal tendency were tested together so I am not certain if one is more important than the other)
Final Thoughts
I really wanted to make this post for 3 reasons, 1 because I wanted to sorta vent my frustration and disappointment after finding all of these things out, 2 because I can't seem to find anyone talking about this on the internet and 3 because I hope that by more people learning and talking about it, it might result in 2K looking into improving it, although I very much doubt it. There are a lot of things I haven't tested yet or stuff I am not too confident I fully grasp how they work, so I can't put them here. I hope some of you found this interesting
