Rating NBA Wingspans for 2k14(NextGen) - QuestGAV's Blog

QuestGAV's Blog

Rating NBA Wingspans for 2k14(NextGen)

Posted on December 20, 2013 at 09:56 PM.

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Gotta love 2k. They take the time to implement the ability to alter player wingspans in the next generation version of NBA 2k14, giving us a tool to further differentiate players by one of the more important physical attributes for a basketball player. Then they release their default rosters with everyone at 50 wingspan, leaving the game just a bit flatter than it could be.

I took it upon myself to implement a realistic wingspan for over 500 current NBA players & free agents in my PS4 roster. I had a few requests to share those ratings for XB1 users (and anyone else on PS4 that wants to take a look) so I wanted to share with everyone how I got there.

The most challenging part was collating the data for 500+ players. For the majority of players (probably about 350-400 of the 500 that I rated) that data is available on draftexpress.com. The other 150-200 players who weren't measured at predraft camps were significantly more time consuming and mostly involved trying to separate fact from grossly over-estimated hyperbolic statements from various forum users across the interwebz. There were about 60 players that I couldn't find any information on at all. Foreign players and players drafted in the '90s make up most of this list.

After that, I needed to decide on how to rate them. The first part of that was looking at how the wingspan attribute actually works. With everyone from Earl Watson to Hasheem Thabeet set to 50 it's easy to tell that taller players have longer arms at 50 than shorter ones so whatever scale is used has to be adjusted for height. You can't simply convert their raw wingspan to a rating and be done with it, or a guy like Eric Bledsoe at 6'0 with a 6'8 wingspan would have a lower wingspan rating than Kelly Olynyk (at 6'11 with a 6'10 wingspan).

So the first step is creating a single number that relates their wingspan to their height. 1-(wingspan/height) gives you a ratio of how much shorter their height is than their wingspan. In the NBA, it ranges from -0.13 for Maxiell, Biyombo, and Brand to +0.01 for Redick and Olynyk. In other words, NBA players range from their wingspan being 13% greater than their height to 1% shorter, with the vast majority falling into the middle ground from 4-7% greater.

Of course, a range of 14 percentage points (1 to -13) helps nobody when you're looking at a 100 point scale. If you multiply those ratios by 5 you suddenly have numbers ranging from -5 to 65. Add 35 and your range is now 30 to 100 and it's looking more like a 2k attribute than 0.01 to -0.13. So ratio*(-500)+35 = wingspan rating. Math is irritating, luckily we have spreadsheets to do it for us!

Let's take a look at the results:
18 players rated 90-100
60 players rated 80-89
108 players rated 70-79
140 players rated 60-69
80 players rated 50-59
70 players rated 40-49
11 players rated 28-39

Reasonably bell-curvy and that makes me happy. It might be a little top-heavy but 1 of those 90+ players isn't in the game at all and 3 more are free agents.

On the low end, Redick and Olynyk are the only players who let themselves be measured with wingspans less than their height. I assume that some of the players I couldn't find measurements for are probably are in the same boat (and most of the unmeasured players got a rating of 40). I saw some speculation that Cody Zeller's wingspan is 6'8 which would put him at a rating of 18 and be easily the lowest in the league.

Take a look at all 560 players!