LiAngelo Ball's Tweaker Track Means We Get to Remind You About NBA 2K MyCareer's Awkward Rap Battles

If you haven’t heard it, LiAngelo Ball released a rap track under the pseudonym of G3, and I’ve already seen many people saying this is definitely going to be in NBA 2K26 or be part of the first trailer for 2K26. Those aren’t the wildest predictions to make (I wouldn’t be shocked if 2K licenses it for a later Season in 2K25 to be honest), but this gives me a chance to remind you how cringe the music scene can be in MyCareer.

And, to be clear, I actually kind of like Tweaker. It’s a blast from the past, and while it’s not something I would go out of my way to play, it definitely would have burrowed its way into my brain via something like NBA Live 2004. After the 10th time I heard it in the menus, I would have suddenly realized it was stuck in my head and it would have inevitably ended up on my iPod. And before you feel sorry for the hypothetical me in the past, this is a way better outcome than the real one where stuff like Pump It Up wormed its way into my subconscious via Madden 2004.

I also think Ball knows what he’s doing by calling back to that ’00s era by releasing the track via WORLDSTARHIPHOP. But this isn’t really about Ball’s moment, this is about reminding you all that this sort of storyline has existed in NBA 2K for years. Creating music tracks, diss tracks, and participating in rap battles and the like are some of the many awkward and cringe things that have weaseled into NBA 2K’s MyCareer mode over the years.

I say those critiques with love because the awkwardness of the rap battles couldn’t exist if we also didn’t have all-time funny things like real NBA players reading their lines in NBA 2K15‘s MyCareer mode.

Those were somehow the best takes (and probably the only takes, to be fair). But I would happily take hilariously mailed-in voice acting over most of the music storylines that make it into MyCareer. At times, I think this stuff gets overlooked because even if millions of NBA 2K games are sold every year, we don’t all play the same modes. I talked about this in my Game of the Year piece, but since these games are so big it’s easy to never even see half the stuff in a modern sports game.

The idea of never even seeing a lot of what’s in a sports game is most true with NBA 2K. It has the most modes of any modern sports game, and so it just has stuff like rap battles buried inside corrupting our youth with its cringe. I point you to the godfather of NBA 2K content creators (Chris Smoove) and his MyCareer playthrough from NBA 2K23 to see a rap battle in all its glory.

Oh, it hurts — but I can’t look away.

And there’s so much more. I mean we can go back to NBA 2K22 for a diss track subplot where you’re in the studio putting together memorable bars like “hear me rapping, got real sick flows.”

Fire! No, I mean it, burn the evidence. This never happened.

The messed up part is there is probably way more than this in NBA 2K’s backlog, but I can only showcase what I remember from my own past with these games. In a way, it’s kind of scary to think about some of the music crimes that have probably gone unreported in these games.

We’ll have to wait and see if LiAngelo Ball puts together a successful second career as a rapper — more power to him if he does — but he’s already more than cleared the bar to get into NBA 2K26. If he wants it, he’s got at least one gig lined up as a potential future voice actor for the MyCareer mode. I assure you he would be an improvement over most of the music subplots that have been in these games in the past.