Legacy issues and sports games go hand in hand, and with NBA 2K25 there are still some lingering problems that pop up in MyNBA/MyGM that have been there for years. One of those issues is that too many good free agents will stay unsigned in the offseason as you progress through the mode.
This means players who shouldn’t be taking one-year deals or shouldn’t be hoping for minimum salary contracts end up going that route or just stay unsigned. This can obviously be annoying and hurt the immersion of the mode. The way to handle this depends on a couple factors, and there are easier and more complicated ways to go about “fixing” it, so it depends on your level of dedication to alleviating the issue.
Because there is not just one solution to this problem, I’m going to give you some of the advice from the forums and also share with you a video from a content creator who does great work trying to tackle this issue each year when a new 2K comes out.
The first way to triage this issue is that as you go into the offseason, leave everything as is at the start of free agency and let the “big name” players sign their deals. As the high-dollar players get signed, then crank the min/max ratings sliders in the contract slider settings.
To put some number values to it, you can keep the contract sliders at 50 for the first half of free agency. After that, bump it to 75 for three days, and then bump it to 100 for the final days.
OS user Dorkington does rightly point out that it’s not just contract demands as the reason why this can happen. If you want to get a little more clinical about it, here is their advice:
There’s also things like progression, injury, and draft quality sliders at play too.
Personally when I start a new MyEras play, my base is to do the following, and then adjust as needed:
- Min Rating 50
- Max Rating 75
- Salary Curve 0
- Reduce the other contract sliders a bit to taste
- Progression 25-35
- Regression 65-75
- Draft Quality 25
If that doesn’t help, you can increase Max all the way up to 100, Min up to whatever, and increase the cap at the start of setup.
You can get even more in the weeds if you want to do 30-team control, or you can just edit players in the short term on other squads. Teams go after positions of need, so if you think Team X should go after a PF, just go to their team and change all their PFs to another position in the short term so they go and find someone in free agency at that spot. You can also boost the CPU re-signing aggressiveness so they don’t let guys with Bird rights leave as often.
Lastly, Popboy’s Game Lab does great work with NBA 2K and handling discrepancies like the free agency issues that emerge in 2K. His latest video on this topic is worth watching as he goes through how to “fix” this issue and also how to handle it for the various Eras in the game:
Again, this free agency issue can be managed, it’s just a matter of how much time you want to invest into it to improve it. (It would also be nice if 2K just got better at doing this themselves when they tune the mode.)