When 2K Sports announced, back in August, how the WNBA would figure into its 2k20 MT flagship, I sort of fixated on the fact it wouldn’t be included in the game’s MyCareer suite and left it off there. In my defense, the official announcement lingered on every detail but the modes of play, which it described as “Play Now” and “Season.” I took the latter to mean a stretch of 34 games without much connecting them.

Wrong. Whoever wrote the news release did the game no favors, because the WNBA gets MyLeague, not whatever “Season” is, and that’s a much more robust mode even if it has taken a backseat to other features lately.

Though MyLeague has large numbers of players (mainly through its online league support) and got a thorough reconditioning in NBA 2K19, its new details also serve the MyGM mode, which wraps the same level of multi-year franchise management in a rich role-playing layer. Thus most of the attention is on MyGM. MyTeam, the fantasy sports/collection mode, also hogs the spotlight, though its attention is not always a good thing.

But when MyLeague is applied to the WNBA, I found a symbiotic outcome that strengthens MyLeague and the title’s value overall, while also taking women’s team sports light years beyond the treatments they’ve gotten in other video games.

The WNBA in MyLeague is short in two key areas: no online leagues, and no means of creating or editing players. But more importantly, it shows a women’s team sport working with and within all the systems of sports’ video games big persistent modes — scheduling, player progression, player management, and even single-player control — that many assumed took too much development time to be done respectfully. That can now be considered a cop-out, not an answer.

Yes, I’m saying the WNBA’s biggest appeal in NBA 2K20 rests on things created for the men’s game and iterated over two decades. That’s the point. The core stuff of a sports title works for them, too, and now there’s proof.The breakthrough for me came when I was going through all the menus and realized I could lock control to a single player, effectively turning MyLeague into a solo career starring Kelsey Plum, a point guard I came to appreciate in NBA Live 19 last year. First of all, NBA 2K is a complicated game made a lot easier when you only control one player, thanks to the game’s AI and playcalling systems (both of which, again, serve WNBA play). That is the backbone of MyCareer play, so we know it can include women. The question now is when.

But elsewhere in the suite, such take-it-for-granted things as dynamic player progression, team chemistry effects and badges (special traits and perks for star players) are also working for the WNBA. To now, women have either cameoed in team sports games (the NHL series) or gotten modes no longer than a tournament (FIFA), which neither have nor need persistent details like these. Stats tracking is also meaningless in shorter side-mode treatments. But because this is MyLeague, the WNBA also gets a full package of tendencies and statistical splits to game plan around. Hell, there’s the full system-optimization menu, where I can evaluate how well my lineup works given a particular focus (quick offense, pressure defense and what have you).Buy Now