3 biggest surprises from the Pistons’ NBA2K23 ratings

This year’s NBA2K23 ratings were unveiled recently, and things don’t look great for the Detroit Pistons.

If you are a gamer who likes to use the Pistons, good luck, as the team has just two players on the entire roster that had a rating of at least 80 overall.

One of them is Cade Cunningham (84) and the other is Saddiq Bey (80), so don’t expect to be winning any titles with the Pistons unless you are some kind of genius savant video game player, or know some way to cheat.

This makes sense, as Detroit has one of the league’s youngest rosters, mostly populated by guys who are unproven in the NBA, or guys who are proven to be pretty mediocre.

It wasn’t surprising that they were one of the lowest-rated teams overall, but there were some surprises in the individual ratings.

Detroit Pistons’ NBA2K23 ratings: 3 surprises

The meaty part of the curve

If you are looking for players who aren’t great but aren’t terrible, the Detroit Pistons might be your team, as most of their players fell into what I like to call “the meaty part of the curve,” the C students who aren’t showing off, but aren’t falling behind.

But I was surprised to see that six players had the exact same rating of 76 overall, which is about as “meh” as it gets.

Marvin Bagley III, Isaiah Stewart, Hamidou Diallo, Alec Burks, Kelly Olynyk and Nerlens Noel all have the same player rating on NBA2K23, which tells me that whoever did this didn’t spend much time watching the Pistons last season.

Diallo received a 3-point rating of 68, while Stewart got a 58, which is why they ended up tied in the overall ratings. Neither of them shot many from long range last season but Diallo was one of the biggest brick layers in the league, hitting just 24 percent of his 3-point shots. I thought Beef Stew should have stood out a bit more amongst this group, but it shows you that the middle of the Pistons’ roster is not perceived to be very good.

Tale of two guards

I already wrote about Killian Hayes getting dissed in the ratings, as he was not only one of the lowest rated players on the team, but came in three points lower than teammate Saben Lee, who is on the fringes of the roster. To be fair, neither of these guys have been very good yet, but Hayes started 40 games last season while Lee spent most of it on the bench or in the G-League.

Putting Lee over Hayes once again shows that these ratings don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things and that not many people outside of Detroit know or care much about the Pistons.

The bottom of the roster

This has to be the most inconsequential of them all, as it relates to two guys who will be fighting to even make the team next season. But Braxton Key (67) came in lower than Buddy Boeheim (68) in the battle of the two-way contracts.

Neither of these guys are likely to play much next season, but Key has at least shown he can compete in the NBA, as he spent time in Philly and Detroit last season after playing most of the year in the G-League. He has a remote chance to crack the rotation next season if there are injuries or certain players falter.

You can’t say that about Boeheim, who looked like a traffic cone in Summer League (to quote Patrick Beverley) and is unlikely to see any time with the Pistons next season or even hold onto his two-way contract.

None of this really matters unless you are a gamer (I’m not) but I think it shows the perception people have about the Detroit Pistons, as well as the fact that not that many people are actually watching.