Game Rules & Settings

Quarter length, difficulty, game style, fatigue, injuries, quarter-time-of-day and the rest of the sliders are your commissioner's to set for the whole league. They will be posted where your league keeps its settings. Load in on the league's settings every game — a game played on the wrong quarter length or the wrong difficulty is not a valid result, and it may be replayed.

The Tip-Off Card lists the common comp-league standards for reference; your league's posted settings override anything printed there or here.

Play basketball a real coach would recognize. These are the standard exploits every serious 2K league bans, and they are banned here — judged on patterns, not single possessions, one slip is a slip, forty is a scheme:

• No zig-zag / rhythm-dribble cheese. Sprinting left-right-left across a defender to farm ankle-breakers is an animation exploit, not a handle. Attack with purpose.
• No steal-spam. Mashing the steal button all game to fish for reach-in animations is not defense. Play position, contest, and take the steal when it is there.
• No excessive full-court pressure. Turning on a full-court trap every possession to farm chaos is a gimmick, not a defense. Pick it up in the half court unless the situation genuinely calls for pressure.
• No intentional-foul or timeout abuse to stop the clock beyond what a real team does late in a close game.
• No exploit farming, period — freeze glitches, unblockable animations, camera tricks, anything the game cannot answer. If it would never work against a real NBA defense, it does not belong here.

Run your team's identity — pace-and-space, grind-it-out, run-and-gun — all of it is welcome, run like the real thing. Sixty possessions of the one action a defense cannot stop is not a scheme, and it is the thing this section exists to prevent.

• Pause only on a dead ball — a made basket, a foul, a timeout, out of bounds. Never pause during live play; it freezes an advantage in place.
• Say why. A quick note in chat — "controller," "phone," "back in two" — keeps a pause from looking like a stall.
• Keep them short and rare. Pauses are for real life interrupting the game, not for icing a shooter or resetting a bad possession.
• Use in-game timeouts as your team's tactical stops; they are part of the game and fully legal.

The game does not know the difference between a dropped connection and a rage-quit, so the league rules on intent:

• A genuine disconnect — console crash, internet drop, power — gets both GMs together to finish. If you can pick up from a saved state, do. If not, bring the score at disconnect and any film to the office, and let the commissioner rule on how to close it.
• A quit is not a disconnect. Walking out of a game you are losing is a conduct violation. The commissioner can award the win to your opponent, apply an XP fine, and put it on your record.
• Report it right away, with what you have — the score at the time, the clip, the game state. The GM who reports honestly and fast is the one the office believes.

Some games will not get played — a GM goes inactive, two schedules never line up, a deadline runs out. Those games can be simmed so the season keeps moving.

• Simming is a commissioner action or an agreed last resort, not a way to duck a matchup you would rather not play.
• A sim earns zero XP for both teams — see XP & Discipline. Nobody profits from a game that was not played.
• A sim still needs to be recorded as a sim so the standings and the pacing math stay honest.