Here's How NBA 2K26's Defensive Settings Actually Work

Coming off Wednesday’s in-depth retro newsletter detailing the cancellation of Madden 96 and emergence of NFL GameDay 30 years ago on the original PlayStation, it’s time to come back to the present day and keep you aware of what’s happening right now during another busy sports game release week.

This means I’ll mostly be ceding the floor to OSers. Long-time NBA 2K sim-head and absolute baller alabamarob will fill you in on how to understand individual defensive settings in NBA 2K26.

And then with NHL 26, I want to mention Fiddy and his useful cheat sheet for sliders if you’re looking to tune things for this year’s game.

We’ll wrap it up with a couple notes on Skate (no, I refuse to make the game title lowercase, you can’t make me) and EA FC 26. Skate officially began its early access for everyone this week, and EA FC 26 enters early access for select pre-orders today.

Before getting into all that, I do want to mention Wednesday’s newsletter one more time. I enjoy everything I write in this newsletter, but Wednesday’s piece is probably one of a handful of newsletters I’m most proud of so far, along with the two-part College Football 26 recruiting guide, and the creation of the hit game show Truth or LIES for Madden 26’s franchise mode.

With that in mind, I’m going to include the same note I had in Wednesday’s newsletter as everyone technically has access to a 30-day free trial if they want to activate it due to a hiccup with our billing account right now.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Whether you’ve subscribed in the past (either monthly or yearly) or done the free trial before, this concerns you. We had an issue with our account that was stopping us from receiving payments for subscriptions. We are fixing it, but here’s what to know:

If you subscribed to the premium newsletter previously, you have not been charged, but this is also why your account may not be working/active right now. If you subscribed to the free trial in the past and it ran out, you have also not been charged if you chose to stick around beyond the 30 days.

This problem should be corrected in the next week or two, but for those who want to read any premium newsletters, you can do so with the free trial, no matter whether you have done the 30-day free trial in the past or not. In other words, you can double dip right now if you want to get another 30 days for free even if you did it in the past.

Be aware the payment snafu should be corrected within 30 days, but this won’t lead to you being double charged or anything like that if you had previously signed up for a monthly/yearly subscription. And if you’re a new subscriber during this period, just be sure to cancel before the 30 days are up if you don’t want to stick around.

For those with active free trials right now, continue about your business. If you signed up for a yearly or monthly subscription in the past, you’ll likely need to re-do that once things are settled on our end (you can start a free trial in the meantime if you wish). We’ll let you know more when we have an update.

NBA 2K26’s Defensive Settings Explained

There is a ton of depth to NBA 2K’s strategy and settings, but like a lot of things in NBA 2K’s menus, the functionality isn’t always easy to understand. There is a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is because stuff like the individual defensive settings are not consistent year to year.

Some years everything works and then other years almost none of the settings work. But whether you play online or offline, this is important stuff to understand if you want to be effective on defense on a team level.

This year, most of the defensive settings are functional after a recent patch (at least on an individual level), and that’s big because most of the modern teams default to a 5-out freelance right now. This matters more for online than offline, but the point is the court is likely to be spread out if you’re playing a “modern era” NBA game, and so you’ll need to tweak some settings to be most effective.

On the negative side, the defensive settings are not as “extreme” as we’d probably like — it’s still somewhat hard to make your center leave a Rudy Gobert if he’s 28 feet from the hoop at the top of the key. In a perfect world, your center on defense would basically just be a roamer in that scenario (while avoiding defensive 3 seconds), but at worst you can off-ball and do this if need be.

As for the more granular, alabamarob’s video will take you through the pick-and-roll settings during the first 30 seconds:

No Hedge, Soft Hedge, Hard Hedge, Double, and Catch all look to be working, which impacts how the big/off-ball player comes up to help you on the screen and roll.

After those 30 seconds, it’s a deep explainer about how defenders react as you change their off-ball settings, which includes Tight, Deny, Gap, Moderate.

Again, in some past years these have barely worked and then in other years they work pretty well. This year it’s a little bit of both.

You should watch the whole video, but basically most of the time if a player is one-pass away or in an obviously dangerous spot (near the hoop even if technically two passes away) the off-ball settings will fully trigger.

However, based on spacing, how overloaded a side of the court is, and the position/angle of offensive players on the court, stuff like Deny/Tight won’t always do what you expect. I wish it was as easy as saying “one pass away is working” and “two passes away is not” but it’s more complicated than that.

The long and short of it is that sometimes players will still follow basic fundamentals of team defense even if you’re trying to override them.

And I say “basic fundamentals” because 2K is treating every player like they’re equally dangerous at points even if they’re not. So while we’d understand why someone doesn’t want to leave a Steph Curry even if we say to, you’d still like to see them listening to their coach! Similarly, you’d like to be able to deny Steph at all times if that’s how you set it in the menu/on the court.

Regardless, at least this video should clear up any confusion on the topic. Rob does this test every year, so thanks as always to him for doing the work.

NHL 26 Sliders Cheat Sheet

As usual, I’m not playing a ton of NHL or NBA 2K quite yet because the real seasons are still weeks away, so I don’t have the same itch like I do right now for football. That said, Fiddy’s Google Sheet detailing prior years of NHL sliders — plus a “living” tracker for how slider sets for ‘26 are coming along — is omega useful.

He includes the default EA sliders, his own sliders, and then an average of some sliders from various OS gurus in the sheet (check the second sheet to see everyone’s sliders from ‘25). I would use this to see where people are generally landing in some categories because it could help you refine your own gameplay experience.

Overall, in my limited time playing ‘26 so far I do think the game is playing pretty well, which is also why I wanted to put this in here this week. Fiddy’s sheet can absolutely help you tweak a couple things you maybe otherwise wouldn’t even know to toggle just by looking at where the values were last year.

Skate And EA FC 26 Arrive

For the second straight year, EA has revived a dormant franchise that hadn’t been seen in 10-plus years. Skate’s launch did not go as smoothly as CFB’s as EA basically had to take the servers offline at one point.

That said, it’s a free-to-play game that is officially in early access and available to everyone — and available on everything that’s not a Nintendo console. I would like to maybe have it on my Switch 2, but such is life. The real bummer is it’s also not available on Steam Deck (at least not yet), so there’s no super easy way to play it on the go.

I don’t have many thoughts on the game yet since I was busy with other stuff this week, but I did play in some of the betas, so I somewhat know what to expect. Ultimately, I think some old Skate fans will hate it, others won’t be able to get over the art style, and others will be happy to have another skating game in the rotation.

I highly recommend watching this video from PropStew as well if you plan to play the game (or are already playing it):

He’s more into the “realistic” side of things, and those settings should help with that while also improving some general gameplay stuff.

If you don’t feel like downloading the (free) game, there’s also plenty of high-quality footage out there:

And finally there’s the juggernaut, EA FC 26. Early access starts today for EA’s footy game, but you’ll need to pay a premium for that one as the game doesn’t “officially” release for all until September 26.

The quickest and best way to get prepped is to read the gameplay Pitch Notes and watch the gameplay deep dive video:

And then for Career mode folks out there, read the Pitch Notes for that one and check this trailer:

I have zero idea what to expect from FC 26 in all honesty, I just hope it’s not as bad as it was last year. For me, it’s sort of in the same zone Madden’s gameplay was a couple years back. This means I’d accept any baby steps of improvement this year because it would at least show me they’re moving in the right direction again. It took until this year for Madden to finally be back in my good graces, so it’s time for EA FC to start putting in that same work to win me back over by the time FC 27 or FC 28 rolls around.

I’ll likely have more on both Skate and EA FC 26 next week once I’ve had a little more time to get my hands on them.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase