They're both right.
If you take a picture from multiple camera angles and make the measurements, getting rid of all visual illusions(remember, wide angle lenses make NBA photos often unreliable), you might find that the court to player ratio in NBA 2k is visually very close to scale. The problem is, you can't SEE the entire 2k model. We all know that there is an invisible collision area around the player and the ball. So while they LOOK a certain size, they are in fact bigger than they appear. Imagine if in real life, all of the players were in clear fat suits. This is what 2k actually is simulating.
One of the key differences is that in real life, the trunk of your body is your main collision area. The extremities are quite thin and small by comparison, taking up very little space without the addition of skill to add accuracy to the placement of your arms and hands. In 2k and virtually every other sports game, there is no way to really simulate this accuracy yet. The devs have to generalize and approximate the effect of arms and hands. Sports games aren't yet precise enough to say "you were off by a pixel, your feet were in the right place, but you were 1 frame off when you pressed steal."
That would be way too punishing, especially once you add in stuff like lag/latency.
The other major problem is movement. Not only do the players have these larger collision areas for you to have to avoid, but you have many less steps to use to navigate these areas. The most obvious example is trying to take a shot at a specific spot on the court, be it the elbow, the 3pt line or anywhere else. The locomotion just doesn't allow for steps small enough for a high level of precision.
This not only makes the court feel smaller, it ACTUALLY MAKES the court smaller. So instead of getting every millimeter out of the 94 feet to use, you only get six inches to a foot at a time.
So now in addition to the fat suits, put giant shoes on your 2k models. Even though you can't see this, this is what you're actually playing with.
Here's the issue: While I see some possible solutions, I don't think there's a true fix at this point in our current technology. If you go too far in the other direction, defense would be absolutely impossible. Out of everything, giving us more precise steps in the locomotion engine would help, but I'm pretty sure that this is a really tough balance to strike with the tech we have right now.
It's not that other games don't have this problem, it's that most games don't have the speed and balance of contact/no-contact that basketball demands in such a tight space with such mobile characters. It's a unique combination of obstacles.
This isn't to excuse or defend 2k or back up or go against Dman, but rather to hopefully add some complexity to the knee jerk reaction of "make the courts bigger, 2k!!!"
--Books
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