
It's just that your talent pool you'll be selecting from will be made up of the very best ball handlers, scorers and big men available in the game, especially if you've unlocked a lot of cool new characters.

Just like in Be a Legend mode, having a well balanced team is the key to dominating the NBA Challenge. Sacramento and Portland are the powerhouses of the North West division with the most versatile and well-balanced teams. The South East is a relative cakewalk with Orlando's one-man gang Tracy McGrady representing the greatest threat in the entire division made up of Atlanta, Orlando, Memphis, New Orleans and Miami. New Jersey and Philadelphia will be the biggest problems in the North East with Jason Kidd, Dikembe Mutombo and Allen Iverson applying the defensive pressure all around.

The class of the Central division will be Indiana, Minnesota and Detroit where Jermaine O'Neal, Kevin Garnett and Ben Wallace, respectively, are waiting to put the heat on you. The other divisions however are a little more manageable. 2, but applying defensive pressure consistently with plenty of steals and blocks is the real challenge as you play through 40 or so NBA Challenge games. Scoring comes easy enough with a few hours gameplay on NBA Street Vol. And make no mistake, it's the defensive abilities of those teams that will aggravate you the most. There's no strategy beyond that for the South West division because you've got so much defensive talent concentrated in one area. We're not even mentioning the weak link of the division, the LA Clippers, and they're still loaded with Lamar Odom and Andre Miller. In the unforgiving South West division, you'll pretty much have to nut up against the Spurs' David Robinson and Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal on the Lakers, Yao Ming and Steve Francis of the Rockets, Dirk Nowitzki and Michael Finley of the Mavericks and Pheonix's ridiculously overrated mix of Stephon Marbury, Amare Stoudemire, Penny Hardaway and Shawn Marion. The best strategy in selecting your team for a run through a division is to gameplan for the toughest teams in that division. Obviously you won't have too many great players to work with initially but there are plenty of talented NBA players to get you over until guys like David Thompson, Osmosis, Nelly and Darryl Dawkins are available. Any crazy combination of NBA players, created players, Street Legends, NBA Legends or unlocked characters can be assembled into a five man team that will be available in NBA Challenge. The great part is any team you've created yourself will show up in the team select menu. You can't just throw a squad together to fit the needs of your next opponent, you have to select a pre-existing team from the team select menu. The key in NBA Challenge is using the correct team to get the job done. So the South West division featuring the Lakers, Spurs, Suns, Mavs, Clips and Rockets will be one of the toughest because the NBA's Western Conference is brutal, but guys like George Gervin, James Worthy and Moses Malone will be waiting for you at the end of that division run. Once you've been the six or so teams in a division you'll face a trio of NBA Legends from teams featured in that division.

The thing is, you'll be locked into that division until you beat every team there but they're balanced so that every division has a nice mix of good and bad teams. This mode is structured so that you'll select a particular division North West or South East that don't always match up to real NBA divisions. Street 2's NBA Challenge mode merely asks you to beat every team in the league, and along the way you'll be unlocking the actual NBA Legends themselves.
