Dallas Mavericks: Luka Doncic, Kristaps Porzingis snubbed from NBA 2K top 20

The NBA 2K20 top 20 rankings were released last night and most of the names on the list were pretty well expected. That said, there were 1-2 exclusions that were reasonably surprising to many viewers.

The NBA has quickly shifted from one super team to a large group of teams with two stars and the Dallas Mavericks are one of those teams. With Luka Doncic and Kristaps Porzingis now on the Mavs roster, Dallas is set to compete in star power with the rest of the league for the foreseeable future.

NBA 2K is a video game created based on reality where you can play as your favorite team or favorite player. Each player has an overall rating from 50-99 with 99 being the highest possible. This year, the top 20 player ratings were released during a live event on Twitter, something that had not been done before.

The hosts of the event started with player number 20 and worked their way down to number 1. The first player named at number 20 was Blake Griffin. After him, at 19, was Rudy Gobert. At this point, I felt like there was a chance that maybe Luka Doncic didn’t make the top 20 list. I was already fairly confident that Kristaps Porzingis didn’t make it.

Next was number 17, Donovan Mitchell. When Mitchell showed up on the list, I calmed down a little and assured myself that Luka was definitely going to be above number 18. Sure, Mitchell is great and has had two really impressive years so far, but I mean he got an 88 player rating and Luka Doncic ended 2019 with an 87. Surely he will be ranked higher this year than last year? Surely he will be ranked higher than Donovan Mitchell?

At number 17 on the list, we have Kemba Walker with an 88 rating as well. The 88 rating continues with number 16, Jimmy Butler. Then we breakthrough to the 89 range, starting with number 15, Karl-Anthony Towns. At this point, it is starting to set in that neither Luke nor Kristaps were going to crack the top 20.

The rest of the top 20 goes as follows: (14) Klay Thompson, (13) Russell Westbrook, (12) Nikola Jokic, (11) Kyrie Irving, (10) Joel Embiid, (9) Damian Lillard, (8) Paul George, (7) Anthony Davis, (6) Steph Curry, (5) James Harden, (4) Kevin Durant, (3) Giannis Antetokounmpo, (2) Kawhi Leonard and (1) LeBron James.

Without getting into the absurdity of the fact that oft-injured LeBron outranked NBA MVP and DPOY finalist, Giannis Antetokounmpo, as well as Finals MVP, Kawhi Leonard, let’s just say that I have serious qualms about the official top 20 rankings from the NBA 2K crew. I am sure it is a difficult job and one that gets met with a ton of negative feedback, but it’s hard to believe there were no biases involved in this one.

Looking outside of just my own personal bias with Luka and KP, the 2K guys still decided that three guys who didn’t even make the All-Star game deserved spots higher than several who did. The rating system is obviously very confusing and must take into account some factors that most would not include when ranking the NBA’s best players.

In fairness, we should have known things were going the wrong direction when they decided that Dwyane Wade deserved the “legends cover” over Dirk Nowitzki. Then boasted about how important Wade was to his city on Twitter. Hopefully the game makes up for a few clear misses before its launch.

Regardless of what they think over at the 2K lab, Mavs fans firmly believe that Luka and potentially KP will be in the conversation as top 20 players in the league this year. We can forgive and forget at that point, but for now, we are calling a spade a spade and recognizing that Luka, at the very least was snubbed from this rating/ranking.