NBA 2K14: How to Include Legends in Your Association Mode Experience

As a lover of fantasy drafts, Association mode and classic players in NBA 2K, I wanted to find a way to meld each feature together to create a robust, fantasy-based experience. If any of that sounds appealing and you haven't figured out a way to do this with NBA 2K14, you'll want to continue reading.

I have a gem I'd like to share with you.

When the game sets up a fantasy draft, it dumps all the players from all 30 current NBA teams and the free agents into a pool of draftable players. The system doesn't recognize the classic teams.

In order to include the players from the classic teams, you must trade or assign those players to current NBA teams or release them into the free-agent pool.

You don't have to use any rhyme or reason when matching players with teams. They're all ultimately going to be put into a huge free-agent pool for the fantasy draft.

There are a few tedious maintenance tasks you have to complete to set this up, but it doesn't take too long. The quickest way to get the legends in the pool of players eligible for the draft is to release them from their classic teams.

This will make them free agents.

Unfortunately, all the classic teams only have the minimum of 12 players. This means you'll have to sign three scrubs from the free-agent pool to classic teams so you can release the Allen Iversons and Michael Jordans of your virtual world.

If there are more than three legends you want in your Association from one classic team, you'll have to repeat the process until they are all in. In total, it took me about 40 minutes to complete the whole process.

That's about the time it takes to play one game, so I didn't mind it too much.

Here's a look at how the fantasy draft transpired once all the desired legends had joined the current crop of NBA players.

As you can see, I included multiple versions of some players like Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant and others. If some of the legends had ratings that were clearly different in their alternate versions, I doubled and tripled their inclusion in some cases.

Having a backcourt of a 23-year-old Michael Jordan, Stephen Curry, Sean Elliot, Tim Duncan and Dikembe Mutombo isn't too shabby. I can't wait to get started with this team, but because of the way I set my league up I know I'll be facing legends every game.

Sports games come out every year. I try to find new and creative ways to enjoy them. This is just the latest in a long line of hair-brain virtual schemes.

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