NBA Showdown -- New Style, GREATEST TEAM OF ALL-TIME Tournament

 So if you've been following the NBA Showdown posts on the blog, you either saw (or should see) this amazing post by Matt announcing and explaining his revamped style of NBA Showdown. As you can see in the example below, it swaps out the nebulous/often nonsensical "Speed/Power" for the straightforward and objective "Offense/Defense" methodology.

Everything else about the game is the same, but now (i) player values/ratings make more sense; (ii) give defensive players their proper value and (iii) gameplay is a simple "offensive players offense - defender's defense + roll" instead of choosing speed or power. 

NBA Showdown: Best teams of the 2020s

 Thanks to help with the formulas and calculations from Matt, my main card creator buddy and the undisputed master of bringing NBA Showdown into the modern age (including his awesome re-imagining of the game with offense/defense rather than speed/power), I went on a bit of a card creating binge. Like, a lot of cards from a lot of teams. And I want to share them with y'all!

I'm going to start with 234 cards from the 2020s -- I made 8 players per team, plus some scattered superstar cards here and there that seemed fitting from the past few years. I hope you enjoy, and let me know which teams were better/worse than you anticipated!

2020 Los Angeles Lakers (52-19, #1 Seed in West, NBA Champions)

NBA Showdown - NBA New Season

 It feels like the season just ended for the NBA and the bubble was a success. This is a pro sports record for the shortest offseason among the 4 major sports. 71 days since the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Championship, and they are partaking in the festivities tonight. I am excited for a new season, as I had said in a previous post, that I will be making the 2020-2021 set for the blog. I figured why not show off some of my early work from last season as a preview of what is to come once this new season comes to an end. So I figured lets start where we left off, and I am going to post the two teams that made the NBA Finals last season, the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Lakers. Hopefully some out there are going to play some games, and if you do please let me know on some feedback, I love hearing results. 

NBA Showdown: Gameplay

Back with another (hopefully) weekly NBA Showdown blog post giving the ins and outs of the game, maybe some new players or teams even, this week I am going to discuss some of the games I played this weekend, which was 12 total games, bu this series will highlight a three game series between two distinctive neighboring teams. Now I have my original post on the NBA section for the rues of the game. They have been slightly altered as I no longer use the 6th man rule, but if you would like super high scores, go ahead and keep using it. I have been doing tons of play testing recently and the games have been a lot of fun, with a wide spread of scores. Biggest win was by 19 points, and one game resulted in a tie, I was hopeful to have a buzzer beater, but the offensive didn't get their offense score + dice roll over a 20, so the game went to over time and ended by 2 point differential. All the other games basically fell between those two ranges.

2019-2020 NBA SHOWDOWN FINAL SET

Hey everyone and Happy Fathers Day!, I know personally for me Father's Day and the NBA go hand and hand as there is usually still the NBA Finals going on, and I remember that fateful game 7 in Oracle Arena on Fathers Day in 2016 as my dad and I watched our Cavs bring home their first NBA Championship in dramatic fashion. After debuting my NBA cards and the game I brought along with it, and I am glad so many of you have given it a chance and played a couple games. As I dove deeper into some of the lower level teams, I noticed how unbalanced some of the offense and defensive ratings were, it is simple, a good defensive team will rate better than a bad team. But once taking the league average and team stats into account before the players stats I have finally been able to settle on how I want these cards to play. So with that I am posting all 30 teams from the 2019-2020 NBA season here in this one blog post. The old posts will be removed and for those that printed I urge you to print these for a more balanced game, and better for drafting purposes, also don't worry the last dance bulls will be updated as well. When looking at players the average offense and defense will fall between an 8 and a 10 for players that are of the 3 quarter or more fatigue. So before the NBA begins again, enjoy these 301 cards and maybe start your own NBA season.