The NBA 2K League Wrapped Up Its First Season With A Thrilling Final And An Eye On The Future


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NEW YORK — It’s a big day for Brendan Donohue. Well, it’s a big day for everyone involved in the NBA 2K League, because for the first time since it launched earlier this year, the league is going to crown a champion.

Things couldn’t have worked out much better for Donohue, the league’s managing director. The final pits Knicks Gaming against Heat Check Gaming, a matchup that features the most unlikely of Cinderella stories in the Knicks (more on this later), one of the league’s best players in Heat Check Gaming’s Hotshot (who came into the finals averaging more than 50 points per game), and a pair of organizations with a ton of history on the real hardwood that is extending to the virtual world.

For Donohue, this is the culmination in a season that has managed to go above and beyond what everyone in the league’s offices had hoped.

“We couldn’t be much happier,” Donohue told the assembled media before the championship game tipped off. “Everything is exceeding our expectations.”

It’s gotten to the point where the league is already making plans to expand heading into its second season. The league is adding four teams, as Atlanta, Brooklyn, Minnesota, and the Los Angeles Lakers will make the jump into adding 2K League affiliates. As Donohue said, the 2K League doesn’t just hope to expand to all 30 NBA teams — the hopes are that the league can go “beyond” North America and add teams in worldwide markets.

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“We expect this to be a global league, so we have every expectation in our future to have teams in London or Shanghai playing against Knicks Gaming or Heat Check Gaming,” Donohue said. “That is on our gameplan. Though when that happens, it’s not definitive, but that is our goal.”

Sure, eSports have been exploding all over the world — you almost certainly saw pictures of when The Overwatch League took over a sold-out Barclays Center last month. But the NBA has made it a point of pride to try and carve out a new path, one in which the league itself serves as the medium through which a league can be formed. Perhaps this will leads to the NFL starting a Madden league or the NHL forming a league in the same vein, but even if that doesn’t happen, the NBA has shown that it can be done. And for what it’s worth, Donohue alluded to the fact that he’s had “conversations with other leagues” about what they’re doing with an eSports league.

It also helps that the league’s freshman campaign ended up being a big deal. Games were streamed on Twitch, with the final getting a peak of around 60,000 concurrent viewers. When those people tuned in, they were treated to quite the show.

Knicks Gaming took Game 1 of the best-of-three finals, leading for most of the game and fending off a torrid comeback by Heat Check Gaming in the final period to win 69-66. The second game nearly followed the exact opposite script, as Heat Check Gaming took a 57-48 lead into the game’s final period. Before the game, Heat Gaming shooting guard Rahmel Wilkins (aka Hyper Is Pro) said this sort if situation is what they strive for in every game.

“If we get a lead by 10, the game is over,” Wilkins said of the team’s 5-out offense, which puts players in both corners, on both wings, and one — star small forward Juan Gonzalez, aka Hotshot — at the top of the key orchestrating the offense, both via scoring and facilitating. “At any point in the game, it’s over. We’re not gonna give up threes. If you’re gonna help off Hotshot and give up threes, that’s your demise, you’re gonna lose. If you’re gonna hug the shooters all game and just let him go 1-on-1, you’re gonna lose as well.”

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However, Knicks Gaming figured out what it had to do to win going down the stretch on both ends of the floor, outscoring Heat Check Gaming by 12 points in the final period to steal Game 2 and lock up the first-ever title with a 74-71 victory. (Head here if you’re interested in watching the final frame of Game 2.)

It was a stunning victory, both in terms of how Knicks Gaming won and how it got there. The team finished with the second-worst mark in the 2K League, but punched their ticket in July, winning The Ticket, a tournament before the final four weeks at the regular season. If the winner was outside of the top-8 squads — Knicks Gaming finished in a tie for 14th on the year with a 5-9 regular season mark — it would have earned an automatic berth in the postseason. Think of it like winning your conference tournament in college basketball and automatically making the NCAA Tournament.

“We got heart,” said Dayvon Curry, aka G O O F Y 7 5 7, the team’s star center and the best rebounder in the league who grabbed a trio offensive boards on a single possession down the stretch to set up a three as Knicks Gaming made its comeback. “You can’t name no team that’s got more heart, better heart, than us.”

Knicks Gaming’s triumph set the tone for the future of the 2K League. While the NBA is mired in an era of superteams and an extended run of dominance by the Golden State Warriors, the 2K League’s first-ever champion needed a magical run to even make its playoffs. From ow on, the team that wins the 2K League will be compared to this — the ultimate underdog going from near-worst to first in the span of a few weeks.

Over the coming weeks and months, Donohue and co. will be tasked with figuring out ways to change up the league — from the potential ways to fix minor issues that decision-makers believe popped up during its inaugural campaign to trying to make a plan for turning this into a truly global league, one with teams in all corners of the world. The good news for those involved with the league, though, is that it’s hard to imagine its first year going any better.

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