With less than a month to go before the release of the newest installment in the NBA 2K franchise, NBA 2K24, the ratings for the league's most prominent players have begun to come out on social media, with reigning Finals MVP Nikola Jokic coming in as the game's highest-rated current player at a 98 overall. Amid all those revelations, it has come to light that Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard, despite suffering serious injury problems for the majority of the past two seasons, clocked in at an impressive 94 overall.

Leonard getting that high of a rating from the 2K development team raised a few eyebrows among fans. But as 2K Games Digital Marketing Director Ronnie Singh (more famously known as Ronnie 2K) explained in an interview with ClutchPoints' Joey Mistretta, the Clippers star has played at elite level for so long that docking his rating for his terrible injury luck seems unfair.

“Obviously it is a big sample size, there’s no bigger sample size than an entire career. He’s (Kawhi Leonard) proven it, he’s done it for a long time,” Singh said. “I mean, there’s a lot of guys when they get injured, we don’t have a lot of sample size so we gotta go off of what we think their game will be… so he’s a really specific example of we gotta believe that the past is going to reflect the present.”

Nevertheless, Singh clarified that 2K won't be stuck in the past and that if the Clippers star man's production declines, his 2K rating will reflect that accordingly.

“Now look, if he struggles when he actually plays for an extended period of time, that rating will be addressed accordingly as the season goes along,” Singh added.

It's not new for 2K games to assign high ratings for longtime stars of the game, injury woes notwithstanding. Back in NBA 2K14, Kobe Bryant came in at a 93 overall despite suffering a torn Achilles his career would never recover from.

Of course, there's quite a bit of uncertainty as to whether Kawhi Leonard can still carry over the top-shelf level of play he displayed last season into the 2023-24 campaign. His postseason (and the Clippers') ended prematurely after Leonard suffered a torn meniscus — his second major knee injury in as many years. But the 2K development team certainly believes in Leonard's chances of remaining elite.