How To Do Training In Nba 2k23

Getting Your Player Up to Speed on the Practice Court

Training in MyCareer is one of those systems that looks simple on the surface but actually eats hours of your life if you approach it blindly. Most people just mash buttons and hope for the best. That works about as well as anything else in a game built by sports fans who never actually tested whether their workflow was efficient. I spent two weeks last year grinding shots at every available opportunity and still ended up with a guy who couldn't finish through contact. The issue wasn't effort. It was method.

How To Do Training In Nba 2k23

The practice court isn't just a mini-game you tab into occasionally. It's the single most important progression tool in the entire build process. You can spend fifteen thousand virtual dollars on gear that gives you a +2 overall, but a solid training routine will give you more real improvement than any item shop purchase ever will. I learned that the hard way when I had a fully loaded mid-range build getting bullied in the paint by point guards with half my attributes. Start with Free Throw line shots. They count for less XP per attempt but they're fast. You can crank out fifty in under three minutes. Then move to close-range two-pointers near the rim. After that, step out to mid-range and finally three-point land. The XP curve is weighted heavily toward makes from distance, so don't skip the deep shots even if your percentages look rough at first. Here's the part nobody tells you: lock onto a specific spot on the floor and stay there. Don't randomly wander around the court practicing from everywhere. Pick one corner three-point spot and one elbow mid-range spot and repeat them until your green timing window stabilizes. I used to bounce between locations every shot and my consistency never improved past a certain ceiling. Once I committed to two spots and drilled them every session, my make rate jumped from roughly forty percent to sixty-two percent within a week of daily practice.

The Passing Grid

Passing practice is completely mechanical. You tap the pass button when the cursor aligns with the target area on the passing lane. It takes about ten minutes to complete and rewards solid XP if you finish with a high accuracy rating. Do this before or after shot practice every single day. I always did it last in my routine, but the game actually awards better bonus multipliers when you complete it first. Flip your order around and you'll see the difference immediately. These get ignored way too often. The rebounding mini-game is straightforward timing-based stuff. Hold the button when the arrow crosses the target zone. Defense drills are where most people drop the ball, literally. There's a sliding footwork component where you mirror the opponent's direction. The trick is keeping your left stick neutral and only moving when the AI teammate gives you a clear passing lane to cut off. I kept failing the advanced defense drills because I was overcommitting with the stick. Once I started holding back and reading the AI's movement patterns instead of reacting to mine, I cleared the drill on my third attempt instead of my thirtieth. If you're building a player from scratch, here's the routine I stuck to daily. Shot practice for twenty minutes covering all ranges, passing grid, then either rebounding or defense depending on your build's weak spots. That's roughly forty-five minutes of content. You'll gain between eight hundred and fifteen hundred training XP per session at mid-levels, scaling up as your overall climbs. The XP requirements grow exponentially past eighty overall, so expect sessions to feel longer and less rewarding the higher you push.

There is a practical ceiling to training XP gains. Once you hit ninety overall, the return on investment drops significantly. Every point beyond that requires far more repetitions for the same attribute bump. I hit that wall with a shooting guard build and basically stopped using the practice court for raw XP grinding. Instead I focused on actual game simulation. Winning games at higher overall levels compounds your XP far more efficiently than another hour at the shooting range.

Attribute Point Allocation

Training XP and attribute points are not the same thing. Training XP buys you generic improvements across categories. Attribute points come from level-ups and are spent in the myCareer menu under the attributes tab. This distinction matters because new players conflate the two and then wonder why their practice routine isn't making them better at finishing. When allocating attribute points, prioritize based on your build's intended role rather than whatever looks shiny. A six-foot-four wing should invest in driving and finishing attributes before worrying about post moves. I wasted nearly two hundred attribute points early on putting them into mid-range shooting on a driver build because I liked the idea of having a reliable pull-up jumper. That decision cost me two full seasons of subpar performances inside the arc where I actually needed the points. Lock in your archetype before you start spending.

Training Gear and Its Actual Impact

Equipment does affect training efficiency. Certain workouts and training programs in the myTeam shop reduce the time required for specific practice types by small but meaningful margins. The gear that cuts shot practice duration by fifteen to twenty percent is worth purchasing if you grind sessions regularly. The rest is cosmetic fluff dressed up as performance upgrades. I bought a basic training program for about four thousand VC that shaved roughly three minutes off my daily routine. That sounds trivial until you multiply it across a hundred sessions over a career arc. One major mistake is treating training as optional filler content. It isn't. The alternative is watching your player stagnate while opponents who trained consistently pull ahead by two or three full attribute tiers by the mid-game. Another mistake is rotating through random mini-games without a plan. You need structure. Without it you'll waste an evening doing everything except what actually matters for your build. The final thing I want to mention is something I discovered almost by accident. If you complete all three training components in a single session without quitting to the menu in between, the game applies a small completion bonus to your XP gain. It's not massive, maybe fifteen percent extra, but it stacks. I started chaining my sessions together and recovered weeks of lost progression in a single sitting. It's a small optimization but the kind of small optimization that separates players who peak at eighty overall from those who reach the late-game comfortably.