rookie who was drafted that summer from appearing in NBA 2K.

Frustrated, Stauffer populated each rookie himself, turning his creations into a downloadable roster update available to anyone who played the game. It blew up. Stauffer's rookie class was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, making enough of a splash for 2K to reach out to him and bring him in for an interview. And that was that.

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Stauffer, who says he "lived" on Basketball Reference as a base to create the player ratings that made up his own rosters, has been constantly tweaking his secret formula since he arrived at 2K ahead of the release of NBA 2K15.

Pre-Stauffer, 2K used 20 or so individual player attributes to create a player's overall rating. Today, it uses more thanan opinion on ratings, which I love," Manning says. "When Whiteside was on that nationally televised game, that was kind of the moment that 2K ratings accelerated in the eyes of the fans and the players. It's crazy that at times it seems players care more about their 2K rating than how they're performing on the court."

Whiteside is far from the only player to talk shop with Manning in his DMs. One player told Manning he was going to develop a sky-hook so he could get his post-game rating up. Another vowed to shoot over 40 percent from deep to boost his three-point shooting rating, because he wasn't hitting threes as himself in the game. For Stauffer, who sees and hears every opinion, he understands the somewhat thankless