Draft Companion
We built Draft Companion for players who wanted their MyNBA Player Lock games to add up to a longer career.
ALL WORK
BEHIND THE WORK
From the brief.
To the build.
The core product decision was to make the box score matter: turn performance into XP, then make each upgrade and career choice understandable.
01The brief
A MyNBA Player Lock game gives someone control of one basketball player, but the longer story can live in notes, house rules, and imagination. Players wanted a clearer relationship between what happened on the court and how their athlete developed afterward.
The challenge was to make that loop useful without pretending to change the console game itself. Draft Companion is an independent, fan-made companion; it is not affiliated with NBA, NBA 2K, or 2K Games.
02What we built
We designed the web product at 2KDraft.com around a repeatable sequence: play a game, enter or import the box score, earn performance-based XP, and develop attributes and badges. The screens make player state and the next decision visible on both desktop and phone.
Lite centers on the MyNBA Player Lock upgrade loop. The broader Pro career world adds high school, college, and NBA paths, with endorsements, interviews, relationships, and other off-court choices giving context to the games. We built the marketing site and the product experience together so the promise a player reads is the loop they can actually try.
03Where it stands
Draft Companion is a working in-house product with a live web experience and ongoing iteration. Its strongest proof is the product itself: the stat-to-XP loop, upgrade decisions, and the career systems players can explore.
Building and running it gives our agency work a real product discipline. We have to keep the first action clear, test the return path, and let the friction players encounter shape the next release. Commercial and audience claims belong in a separate, dated performance report when the underlying records are verified.
