15 NBA Players Who Are Better in NBA 2K Than in Real Life

Because, sometimes, reality bites.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Certain NBA players possess levels of talent that normal humans would commit various felonies to obtain. But fans love most of these players. It's the ones who are incredibly skilled, but are missing a certain...something else...who truly get a fan base's goat.

Whether it's a lack of hustle, drive, or another coded-word-du-jour used by sports columnists, these guys still manage to eke out a living for ten or so years and go on to become the subjects of great barroom debates. 

And yet, there remains one final venue for fans to remove the rust from, say, JaVale McGee, and allow him to run rampant on the court, terrorizing opponents all over the world: The NBA2K games, in which the true gems of the game are the players who maybe aren't world-beaters IRL, but who have one-great skill (a dead-eye three-point gunner say) that makes them ridiculously frustrating to play against, but supremely fun to play as.

This list celebrates some of those players who allow one to troll their opponents, but also some NBA luminaries whose rating in the games made you scratch your head. To measure it, we'll be using PER, a metric created by ESPN's John Hollinger that measures the statistical impact of a player in a minutes-weighted, per-game basis.

It's not a perfect metric, but it's pretty good and, with a large enough sample size, it tells the story just fine. An average player will have a PER of 15.00 (last season LeBron James's PER was 30.7, 3.7 points ahead of Chris Paul). This list isn't to complain about Allen Iverson being unstoppable in the earliest NBA 2K games (he was on the cover, what did you expect?), or Shaq or Shawn Marion being too good one year too many. But it is for them, or at least, the digitized versions of them.

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15. Stephen Curry

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14. Charlie Villanueva

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13. Cuttino Mobley

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12. Jason Richardson

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11. Ben Wallace

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10. Ronald "Flip" Murray

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9. Kirk Hinrich

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8. Rudy Gay

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7. Jamal Crawford

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6. Nate Robinson

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5. JR Smith

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4. Chauncey Billups

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3. Jonathan Bender

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2. Vince Carter

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1. Michael Doleac

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