Hi! Good morning! Welcome to a Save Point.
Mike Dunleavy, Jr. is the GM of the Golden State Warriors. He played in the NBA for 14 years in six cities. His best seasons came with the Indiana Pacers; during the 2007-08 season, he played 36 minutes per game and averaged 19.1 points per game on 47.6% shooting (42% from 3-point range) across all 82 games.
Much of his later career was derailed by injuries, but his unquestionable basketball pedigree and sharpshooting kept him in the league for another nine years after that season.
His father, Mike Sr., had a substantial playing career and an even longer coaching career, peaking with the 1999 Coach of the Year award during his tenure with the Portland Trail Blazers.
The name “Mike Dunleavy” carries weight in the basketball world. It’s the name of two vital figures: one whose legacy is written, and one who is looking to continue his father’s as a leader.
To me, “Mike Dunleavy” is that white guy that couldn’t miss a shot in NBA 2k13.
Is that reductive? Not if you lived through what I lived through.
The 2012-13 Milwaukee Bucks were a middling team. Before Giannis and Khris brought Milwaukee a title, there was the original “Bucks in Six:” an inside joke among NBA Reddit that made fun of how little chance this team had against the LeBron/Wade/Bosh Miami Heat. A losing record was enough to get an 8-seed in the Eastern Conference in this era — an accomplishment for a team that “parted ways with” its head coach 32 games in — but they were unceremoniously swept by the Heatles on their way to another Championship.
A scroll through this team’s Basketball Reference page shows a team that played to expectations. Vegas had them at 36.5 wins, and BBRef’s Expected Wins/Losses had them at 37. They went 38-44.
They strung together some 3-game winning streaks, but tallied more 4- and 5-game losing streaks, including a brutal one in the final stretch of the season that included a 10-point loss to the lowly Charlotte Bobcats.
Important Note: The interim head coach for the Bucks after Scott Skiles left the team was Jim Boylan, a lifelong assistant coach whose only head coaching experience comes from interim stints with the Bucks and Bulls. He is not to be confused with Jim Boylen, former head coach of the Bulls who is known for wasting now-All-Star Lauri Markkanen’s time and talent, baffling timeout usage, and being a hard-ass Tom Thibodeau style coach without the Tom Thibodeau winning (Boylen’s .317 winning percentage is 2nd-worst all-time for the franchise).
This Bucks team was about as average as it gets. So, why is it the team I remember most from this entire decade? Why not the 2015 Spurs, or the ’19 Raptors, or God, Joe, just any team that won a playoff series? Shit, a playoff game!
Well, ever-present condescending voice in my head, I lied a little because the 2013-14 Knicks were far more impactful to me. Still, these Bucks are a ridiculously close second.
I played NBA 2k like it was a basketball game. I tried to emulate the NBA teams I knew and how they ran their teams.
I played a balanced game. Inside-outside scoring, post looks, open midrange shots. Sharp defense without reaching. Methodical. My “MyPlayer” was a 6’8”, 240-pound bruiser who, at his best, would tally triple-doubles with ease thanks to slashing ability and paint prominence.
This is not how you are supposed to play NBA 2k.
You are supposed to play NBA 2k more like how the Golden State Warriors won their titles: fast, frenetic basketball; open threes and layups only; stout defense with a penchant for gambling that led to more fast breaks; hucking threes on those fast breaks for maximum points.
While I stubbornly stuck to my play style, my neighbor Ethan already understood how to win in this game. He was always more mathematically inclined than me, and therefore understood that 3 points is more than 2 points, and the faster you score points the more points you get. Points win games. Points good. Ethan’s “MyPlayer” reflected this: a short, quick point guard with an unguardable pull-up 3-pointer as soon as he came into the league.
As the real-life league evolved and shifted towards the threes-and-layups style that dominates the league today, I lost my grip on the game. But in 2k13, Ethan and I were evenly matched. He would pick the Warriors or the Thunder and chuck threes with KD or Steph; I’d pick the Bulls or Knicks and drive to the hoop with D-Rose or Melo.
Eventually, we realized that if we really wanted to test our skills, we should be picking random teams. So we did. Sometimes it would end up in lopsided fights between the Magic and Lakers; sometimes we’d both get teams in the shitter and make Timberwolves/Bobcats look like a bare-knuckle boxing match.
One day, we’d get the Bucks.
I don’t recall exactly, but I think Ethan was the first to discover how broken this team was.
Their starting lineup of Monta Ellis, Brandon Jennings, Ersan Ilyasova, Samuel Dalembert, and Ekpe Udoh was innocuous. The only odd piece was the placement of 2 Power Forwards in the starting lineup; Ilyasova was a stretch-4 with a dangerous 3-pointer, but his defense was… bad.
Jennings and Ellis were the obvious stars. Jennings for his playmaking ability and above-average 3-point shot, and Ellis for his ability to make anything inside the 3-point line.
Monta Ellis did not jive with Ethan’s game. He made one switch that changed our lives forever.
He put in Mike Dunleavy.
For some reason that will likely escape me forever, Mike Dunleavy, Jr. had the wettest shot in the game. He could hardly dribble, he could not play defense, he certainly couldn’t drive. Didn’t matter. Anything from behind the arc was going to fall.
I’m no stranger to raging over a game of 2k or Madden, especially when Ethan would rain down threes on me for six minutes while Pop That by French Montana played. When it happened with Mike Dunleavy, though, it was impossible not to laugh.
I adopted the lineup soon enough and found similar success, confirming it wasn’t some fluke. With Jennings’ ability to penetrate, Dunleavy and Ilyasova on the outside and Dalembert on the inside to Hoover up offensive boards, they were unstoppable.
Drive, kick, bucket. Drive, kick, miss, rebound, kick out, bucket. Drive, kick, bucket. Repeat for 20 minutes.
We would experiment with that last spot in the lineup — sometimes opting for backup point guard and then-Future Knick Beno Udrih, a raw Tobias Harris, or another guy with a funky last name in Joel Przybilla (not Turkish, just Minnesotan). JJ Redick — my second-favorite JJ currently in sports media — was an obvious choice for a sharp-shooting offense, but he only joined at the trade deadline. ’12-’13 was the worst 3-point shooting season of his career as well, and that was reflected in a digitally downgraded 3-point rating.
Ultimately, we settled on reintroducing Monta Ellis to the lineup for extra penetration and in case his coding ever allowed him to hit a three.
This lineup — Jennings, Ellis/Redick, Dunleavy, Ilyasova, Dalembert — would be the center of the greatest NBA 2k duels of its era. Once Ethan and I learned how to turn off automatic timeouts, substitutions, and player fatigue, it was on.
Most of our 2k sessions would go like this: two or three random games, fifteen seconds of silence, and then…
“Bucks?”
“Bucks.”
20 minute games. Same five players. The only differentiators now were skill with the game and whatever numbers the game spat out to decide if a shot goes in. Plus, whichever of us managed to select the Bucks cool throwbacks first.
These were not virtual basketball games. These were wars, fought in a well-furnished basement with Meek Mill blasting out of an iPhone.
Most of the individual games have been lost to the ether of my memory. I don’t recall a single final score, or a game that sticks out.
I can’t forget the feeling of those games, though. The determination in my soul to prove my skill in something. Flicking down the right stick for a behind-the-back dribble in transition in an attempt to slash past a porous defense for a layup or kick-out.
Silence fell over us in the fourth quarter of a close Bucks/Bucks game. Nothing but that iPhone speaker and the frantic clicks of PlayStation 3 joysticks and triggers as we tried to get any advantage, despite the fact that we both intrinsically understood each player’s shot release and movement ability. We knew every bit of code that existed in that Bucks roster.
That Bucks team was the definition of a forgettable team playing for a then-forgettable franchise, so milquetoast that they became a meme to thousands of online NBA fans.
A forgettable team that is drilled to my brain forever, not because of anything they did on the court, and certainly not because they “laid the foundation” for a future Bucks championship. Only because some underpaid and overworked programmers for 2K Games made it damn near impossible for Mike Dunleavy, Jr. to miss a shot.