NBA 2K27 has put all five New York Knicks starters inside its first top-100 player ratings, a clean reminder that the reigning champions are being treated like one of the game’s elite teams. Jalen Brunson came in at 96 overall, tied for fourth place, while three players — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Victor Wembanyama and Nikola Jokic — were given 97s.
The ratings matter now because they are part of the first iteration of the NBA 2K27 rosters going into the season, before the game reaches players in the coming weeks. After the Knicks won the 2026 NBA Championship, a bump was expected, and the early numbers show it went beyond Brunson: Karl-Anthony Towns is the team’s second-highest rated player at 14th overall, giving New York two names near the top of the list before the season has even tipped off.
That is the headline for the Knicks, but it is also where the ranking gets more interesting. Brunson sits in a tie for fourth at 96, yet he is still below the three players at 97, which is a small gap on paper and a big one in a rating system that likes to separate the very best from everyone else. OG Anunoby also landed well inside the opening group, with only 23 players ahead of him in the first version of the roster set, and none of the five reigning champion starters were placed lower than 79th.
The broader point is simple: the opening NBA 2K27 rankings treat the Knicks’ title season as proof, not projection. That can change once the season begins, because these ratings are fluid, but for now the first top-100 release has done something unusual even by champion standards — it has placed an entire starting five among the game’s best 100 players. For a team that still has the new-season spotlight on it, the next shift will not come from the game’s launch date so much as from whether the ratings hold once real games start pushing them around.
