Raptors Uprising GC is a premier franchise of the NBA 2K League and calls The North home. But what goes into creating a team that has won everything from NBA 2K League MVP to Best Community Engagement? From the hardware to insider tips, we sat down with 2020 NBA 2K League MVP Kenneth “Kenny Got Work” Hailey, and Director of Esports Shane Talbot to find out what it takes to bring their team to the next level.

Shane: NBA 2K League is a video game league based on the best-selling basketball video game NBA 2K, and [besides RUGC] there are 23 other franchises – 22 of which are represented by NBA franchises, 1 of which is represented by what we could call a more endemic Esports team: the Gen.G Tigers of Shanghai. They are the first NBA 2K League team to represent a non-North American market. [Expanding globally] is one of the goals and visions of the NBA 2K League. It’s the NBA’s first real opportunity to expand globally, just because the logistics are a little more conducive to international markets in video games than it is in traditional basketball.

Kenny: There’s a lot of history between the guys that are on the team now. We made a lot of history last season by going 16-0 with one guy currently on the same roster this season. We just made a big trade and brought in [Dimez] who was the number one overall pick in the 2K League season 1, and we got another guy that’s a tournament MVP. We have two guys who were here season 1 and 2 and they’re back for season 4 with us.

Shane: Our roster is now, as of a trade we did last week, entirely made up of veterans in their fourth season. All our players now were part of the inaugural draft. Our teams are built through a draft system, not unlike traditional sports drafts. We’re unique in Esports in that sense. Every other team in Esports is basically built through open markets — whoever can sign the best teams gets them. With ours, just to create a little more parity, and to create a really cool moment in the calendar year for us — the NBA decided to create this really cool draft system. Last season, we had an outstanding season. We had the MVP of the league, Kenny, who’s still with us, and we have the defensive player of the year, TimelyCook, who’s still on our team.

Shane: I like to use that old expression they’re building the plane on the way up. So, we’re the first league in the Esports world to do a draft and every year it gets better. Traditionally what happens is there was sort of an open combine and anyone who had the retail version of NBA 2K — if they met the qualification requirements —could make it into the combine. That process has continued to evolve and in the most recent iteration, the most common way into the draft pool is through tournaments run by the teams. Each team gets to host their own and the rules can change and vary from tournament to tournament. One of the rules of our tournament — Scout the North — which LG was involved in last year, gave a monitor to the MVP — is that it’s for Canadian players only. So, this is really a path for Canadian players to get into the draft pool, it’s an opportunity for us to scout talent here in Canada. Then there are a couple other ways to get in. There are some international tournaments […] but eventually we get down to hundreds of players who qualify for these tournaments, and they go into what is now a more closed combine. So, the combine is not strength testing and vertical like you would see in traditional sports. It’s really five on five pick-up games of NBA 2K and general managers get to watch those games and scout talent. From there, it whittles down further: they do interviews, they do background checks, there are a bunch of other hurdles to get over and if you make it into the draft pool, usually there’s a big draft event in February or March where all the teams traditionally have gathered in New York.

Kenny: I game on a 24-inch monitor, we’ve got that back home, and we’ve got that here. We’re hooked up to the PC, we’ve got OBS running, and things like that. I keep some Astro headsets.

Kenny: I feel like you do wanna be on a gaming monitor instead of a 50-inch flatscreen TV because of input delays and things like that, so you wanna play at the highest level. It gets you prepared for the season. One of our players was gaming on like a flatscreen the whole season, and he was playing at a high-level. I was like, bro, we gotta get you a monitor so you can be prepared because you can’t do that going into the next season. I’m gonna stay on him this whole season, you know, his set-up. We have to be way more prepared than we were going into the next season.

Kenny: You want to try to game in the highest frame rates. I mean some games you only go 60 frames, but you do want that 144Hz at least. I’m not the biggest tech guy, but—

Shane: -response time, 1ms or better response time.

Kenny: Response time, yeah, things like that matter because you don’t wanna be doing moves and it’s reacting late, that’s gonna throw you off and now it just took you out of it.

Shane: You know, we’re still so focused on season 4 right now. There are a whole lot of changes that we’ve had to weather. You know, there were platform changes, the game changed a lot this year. There’s this upcoming tournament [The Ticket] and essentially all the non-playoff teams compete within their conferences. So, we’ll see how the rest of the season goes. There are only five weeks left if we make it all the way to the finals and less if not. And at that point, based on the information we have, we’ll start thinking about what to do in season 5, but in the meantime, we’re really focused on what we can accomplish here.

Kenny: Yeah, I agree. We’re not out of it yet. We’re focused on this season. There’s The Ticket and history shows that it’s been done. A team that’s been out of it punched their ticket and made the playoffs through the tournament and there’s no reason why this team shouldn’t be able to do that.