I’ve built a lot of Associations in NBA 2K13 that would never work in real life. Yes, it’s partly because I’ve abused the trade logic to get what I wanted, but even disregarding that, the teams I like to make tend to be heavy on talent and light on experience. I’ve won the Larry O’Brien Trophy before with a team of players all under 24, and that’s not something you see very often. (The youngest team to win an NBA Championship was the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers, whose median age was 24.)

In their own perverse way, the real life Los Angeles Lakers tried to do something similar this year. Instead of a team of young up-and-comers, though, they put together a roster that was heavy on talent and experience, but old, injury-prone, and without a clear direction.

It lines up pretty perfectly in NBA 2K13, as anyone who’s played with the Lakers can attest. Steve Nash runs the team perfectly, with pinpoint passes and nary an epidural to hamper him. Kobe Bryant gets you buckets whenever you need them, in whatever way you need them, and without shooting the team out of the game. Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard play like the All-Stars they are, without pesky back ailments to slow them down, both of them occupying space down low without getting in each other’s way. And Metta World Peace … well, he’s there and he defends pretty well.

As for the bench? Leave them there, or bring in Jamison and Blake every so often and things don’t fall apart. The Lakers this season were constructed to be a video game basketball team at its finest, with little regard to issues of chemistry or pre-existing and possible injuries. The lineup the Lakers played most (339 minutes in the regular season) featured Earl Clark instead of Pau Gasol, while the one they played second most (192 minutes) featured Darius Morris at point guard instead of Nash. For comparison’s sake, the Thunder’s starting five played 1307 minutes together.

Aside from injury concerns, the reason the Thunder could do this when the Lakers couldn’t is because the starters on the Thunder have very specific roles. Durant and Westbrook are there to take shots and create holes in the defense. Sefolosha and Ibaka are there to make open long-range and mid-range jumpers, plus the occasional layup or putback dunk, respectively. Perkins is there to set picks. In some ways, the roles are reversed on defense, where Perkins, Ibaka and Sefolosha become more important, although both Westbrook (with steals) and Durant (with improved overall defense) are significant contributors there as well.

The result was a team that ranked second in offensive efficiency (scoring 110.2 pts per 100 possessions), fourth in defensive efficiency (allowing 99.2 pts per 100 possessions) and first in net efficiency (+11 pts per 100 possessions). You can bag on Scott Brooks for his flat playcalling and inability to get good looks down the stretch, but you can’t knock the overall results for the team.

The Lakers featured no such order. Nash, one of the greatest creators and shooters at the point guard position the game has ever seen, was brought into a system—the Princeton offense run by Mike Brown—that de-emphasizes the point guard position. When Brown was fired just five games into the season, the team brought in D’Antoni, who coached the Nash-led Suns to several playoff appearances and Nash to back-to-back MVP wins in 2005 and 2006. D’Antoni did this with a spread offense that put Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire in pick-and-rolls with shooters on the perimeter around them.

But instead of being the roll man, Dwight Howard kept insisting that he needed to get more touches in the post. This in spite of the fact that he was enormously successful in Orlando using—you guessed it—the spread pick-and-roll attack. One of the best passing big men in the game, Pau Gasol, was taken out of both that role and the role of post player; it seemed like D’Antoni didn’t know what to do with him when he was healthy.

When it comes to working with players like Nash, Gasol and Howard in the real world, you need them to understand and embrace their roles—something you need not worry about in NBA 2K13. If you’re playing as the Lakers, you can run a pick and roll one possession, set up Gasol at the elbow and run off-ball action the next, then isolate Kobe on the next and none of these players’ digital doppelgangers will care at all. At worst, if you’re running an Association, they might get a little miffed at their minutes over the course of the season. In the real world, it’s not just ego you have to deal with, but each player’s understanding of what his role is on the team.

This gets particularly difficult when it comes to Kobe Bryant.

Bryant was never going to be a spot-up shooter in an offense where Nash and Gasol or Howard would be the primary offensive options. Bryant needs the ball in his hands a lot: although not quite as high as it has been the past two seasons, his usage rate of 31.9 percent was still high enough to be third in the league. When the going got tough towards the end of the season and it looked like the Lakers might not make the playoffs, Bryant angrily took control of the team in sort of the way your mom would fiercely stalk around your room putting toys away after you had failed to clean it up when she asked for the umpteenth time. The result was an 8 seed, an injured Bryant and a first-round lost to the San Antonio Spurs.

There’s not much the Lakers could have done about the injuries. From that perspective, this season might have been a lost cause all along. But it could have worked with the personnel they had if the leadership had been clearer and more consistent.

It will be interesting to see what happens this offseason: Will they keep D’Antoni and will he be more successful with a full offseason to work with the team? Will Howard be back and will he return to something like the form that made him an MVP candidate in Orlando? Can Bryant come back strong from his ruptured Achilles and what do they do in the meantime?

Uncertainty clouds the Lakers’ future in a way it hasn’t in some time, but one thing’s for sure: whatever happens in the real world, they’re sure to remain a powerhouse in NBA 2K14.

Statistics from NBA.com.