A team of Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, Paul George, Aaron Gordon and C.J. McCollum should be unbeatable. It is a lineup of all-stars and potential all-stars, a star quintet with personality, flair and singular talent. Put them together on a basketball court, and there would be little hope of stopping them. Fire them up as a five-some in NBA 2K and watch opponents cry injustice or the game itself tap out.
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Or so you’d think.
As it turns out, that super-group is beatable in the 2K landscape, as pro-am eSports team Still Trill showed the world at NBA All-Star Weekend in New Orleans last year. Playing themselves in the 2K17 instalment of the NBA’s flagship video game franchise – and NBA players fancy themselves some of the best 2K players around with arguments and showdowns abounding in locker rooms and Snapchat stories – the five NBA stars proved no match for a group of professional gamers. And it wasn’t even particularly close, with Still Trill dominating a 95-52 game that was so one-sided it had host Hannibal Burress asking if Durant would now try to join Still Trill.
These guys put up a tougher battle than Euro guys pic.twitter.com/FpjDJDt9SY
— S T I L L T R I L L (@Still_Trill2k) February 18, 2017
The No. 1-ranked NBA 2K outfit didn’t just secure a lifetime of bragging rights by claiming dominance over actual NBA players. The showdown was a part of the NBA 2K17 All-Star Tournament, a six-week competition featuring thousands of teams that culminated in a championship game at the NBA’s all-star weekend. With a finals victory over ThrowDown, Still Trill also earned $250,000 to split between themselves and tickets to the all-star game. The five players also gained a modicum of notoriety in the eSports community, establishing themselves as the gold standard for 2K team play (their Twitter warns not even to ask to play against them “if 250k isn’t your goal”).
That attention didn’t resonate in the gaming world alone. Two weeks prior to the final, the NBA and 2K Sports announced that they’d be teaming up to become the first professional U.S. sports league to run an official eSports league. It’s the latest sign of growth in the rapidly growing world of eSports, which according to the BBC, has seen revenue projects rise from $130 million in 2012 to an expected $465 million in 2017. The NBA’s initial high-stakes tournament was an interesting barometer as to the potential public interest in the venture. And it was considered a success – 2K estimates over two million people tuned into the tournament, including one million via Twitter and more than 230,000 who watched the 90-minute championship stream on YouTube.
“There are a completely different set of professional athletes,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said at the time. “It may be a different kind of physical prowess in terms of reflexes and your ability to move your thumbs very quickly, but these athletes can be any shape or size and any age and from anywhere. So we’re very excited to move into that business.”
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Fast-forward a few months, and plans for the NBA 2K eSports league are taking shape. There will be 17 NBA teams participating, including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Golden State Warriors, Philadelphia 76ers and Toronto Raptors. ESPN reports that doing so required a three-year, $750,000 commitment. The recent release of NBA 2K18 should only ramp up excitement, and gamers will have a few months to build themselves up and play their way into contention for one of the 85 spots in the gaming league.
Details are still being worked out, according to Brendan Donohue, the managing director of the NBA’s 2K eSports league, but the plan looks something like this: Gamers will have until February to get used to the new game and test themselves against progressively more intense competition through other grassroots tournaments and events. Then there will be a massive tryout/combine of sorts. The time before tryouts is crucial because players will need to learn the intricacies of the game and build up their avatars, which takes time.
“For the elite players, you’ve gotta give them a couple months to just get used to the new change,” says Donohue. “There are little tweaks here and there, and when you’re an elite player, that makes a big difference.”
The league will then outfit the 17 teams with a host of data from those tryouts to try to make informed decisions and hold a draft sometime in March. This could be tough for an elite team like Still Trill who have played together for some time, as it would seem unlikely one of the 17 teams would be able to keep more than a couple of them together. (As they and other elite teams have shown, NBA teams should put a heavy emphasis on the fit of the archetypes on their roster.)
From there, the aim is to have players in their market in April, practising at a local facility and building a fanbase through community events. The 15-week regular season will begin in May and be played out at one or two central studios at a North American location, still to be determined. It will culminate in a two-week playoffs in August.
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If that sounds like a long schedule, it is — but the 2K calendar is a 12-month one, stretching from September release of the new game to the successive September release. (The proposed calendar also overlaps nicely with the NBA calendar itself. The NBA has inched closer and closer to being a 365-day-a-year league, but if there’s a downtime, it comes in August, right as the eSports league should be reaching its crescendo.)
How the league will be received and what will qualify as a success for the NBA and 2K are still question marks. There is a great deal of excitement based on the numbers from the all-star tournament and a sense that with a full year to put the marketing muscle of the NBA and 2K behind it, viewership could take off quickly. The dramatic rise of eSports in general has been incredible, and several NBA owners are already invested.
“We see huge potential,” Donohue says. “We’ve been looking at eSports now for a couple of years and just seeing it grow and grow and grow, exponentially growing every year. There’s not a single indicator suggesting it’s gonna be otherwise over the next at least three years. We think it’s going to continue, we’re really bullish on it.”
Stick-and-ball sports, though, are yet to carve out a major role in the eSports arena. FIFA and 2K are popular games, but neither rank in the top-10 in eSports viewership on Twitch, the leading eSports streaming service, and they’re not selling out arenas and stadiums like games such as League of Legends, Dota or CS:GO do. This will be mostly unchartered waters for a professional sports league to wade into, and there are some barriers to aggressive entry.
“Trying to make a video game into an eSport is a challenge alone,” says Kyle Chatterson, the director of content and partnerships at theScore eSports. “Many game companies have tried to make their game or brand popular in the space, trying to court the long term benefits of having a well-developed eSports scene, but the reality has been that the most successful and largest eSports scenes started from a swell of grassroots support.
“However, none of these games had the kind of brand power that the NBA and their franchises are bringing to the table.”
That last point may be where the NBA sees the most opportunity. Professional sports as eSport hasn’t necessarily taken off, but there are signs there could be a market. The success of Rocket League, a vehicular soccer video game, as an eSport comes to mind. 2K states it has 1.6 million players who play for 90 minutes daily, the game has sold nine million copies and a free online version available through tencent in China has 34 million registered users. There’s a market there if they can tap into it effectively.
“I think No. 1, we definitely want to look at, just viewership, certainly viewership and engagement and those metrics,” Donohue says. “Stick-and-ball sports, I think we haven’t tried yet. We have dabbled a little bit in terms of hosting eSports events. We have such a small sample size in terms of time we’ve really tried to do this the right way. We’re very bullish on the fact that we can make this work.
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“And 2K’s a wildly popular game, it’s not like we’re starting from zero. We have a very captive audience.”
The league hasn’t decided on a distribution vehicle or media rights for streaming yet – Twitch boasts 10 million daily viewers and continues to grow rapidly but other options are available – but they’ll look to build popularity quickly. The hope is the base viewership can grow with marketing muscle from the NBA and 2K, the organic engagement of NBA players who are already fervent players and the building of each team’s five eSports athletes as stars in their respective markets.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the first batch of players in the NBA2K league already have significant social followings,” Chatterson says. “Combined with the brand strength of franchises, as well as the accessibility that eSports offers to fans, the only challenge is finding the players that have the right mix of gaming prowess and marketability.”
Five of those potential players steamrolling five of the NBA’s best in front of two million viewers is a nice way to kick-start that entire process.