North Carolina Tar Heels: The Custom NBA 2k17 Roster

The North Carolina Tar Heels have plenty of players in the NBA, but would they function as a NBA 2k17 team.

The North Carolina Tar Heels have nine players currently active in the NBA Playoffs. Those aren’t the entirety of former Tar Heels in the NBA as a whole, though. They are also dispersed on many different teams. What if they were on the same team?

There is a way to do that, video game basketball. One of the most fun I had with video game basketball over the years was building custom rosters of various sorts. My first exposure came in NBALive95 where you could trade players for each other on any roster (just not multiple player trades) and the game gave you four custom teams to fill any way you wished.

Back then I had a left handed team, an all rookie team, and a Tar Heel team to play with. I also had an all-Dennis Rodman team, but that was its own beast. One of my last experiences with the NBALive series was the 2003 version where Michael Jordan was playable. The Wallace-Jamison-Carter-Jordan-McInnis roster may still be my favorite custom team.

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Now the scene is dominated by the 2k series which started picking up steam around 2005. It included some historical players and so I actually managed to create a pickup team of Walter Davis, Billy Cunningham, James Worthy, and others. Yet for the most part, I don’t try to mix old and new too much unless it is 2k11 Jordan, because that was too cool.

I built the Tar Heel pro team in 2k15, but had not returned to it since. Even now seems a little late, but NBA 2k17 is still the most recent game until August or so. So let’s create the 2k17 Carolina Roster as it would appear in a custom setup. I am using any player that the game includes in its base roster. That includes free agents and retirees that are still there. Also, I am going with the highest provided rating even if there is another player with a bigger role.

2k17 North Carolina Tar Heels Roster

North Carolina Tar Heels Basketball /

North Carolina Tar Heels Basketball

Starters

C – Brandan Wright (76) Memphis

PF – Marvin Williams (75) Charlotte

SF – Harrison Barnes (80) Dallas

SG – Danny Green (76) San Antonio

PG – Ty Lawson (74) Sacramento

Reserves

C – John Henson (75) Milwaukee

SF – Vince Carter (74) Memphis

PG – Raymond Felton (74) LA Clippers

SG – Wayne Ellington (74) Heat

C – Tyler Zeller (73) Celtics

C – Ed Davis (72) Trail Blazers

SF – Reggie Bullock (70) Pistons

Inactive

PF – Tyler Hansbrough (71) Free agent

PF – James Michael McAdoo (67) Warriors

PG – Kendall Marshall (68) NBDL

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Comments:

How the mighty have fallen. There are still sixteen Carolina players in the 2k17 basic database, but none of them are stars anymore. Generally speaking a rating of 72 is about par for the course in the game. There are a bunch of folks clustered near there, but none above 80 where Barnes is at. By comparison, Carter was an 80 rating in 2011.

There are a lot of post players in this group these days. I was surprised to find how shallow the guard bench had gotten. Carter and Ellington are basically it as wing players off the bench.

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With this roster cranked out, there is only one thing left to do. Find the Duke guys and put them on their own roster and compare the two. I have a bad feeling about this.

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