These NBA 2K athletes grew up together. Now they're teaming up with the Jazz

They'd go to college. They would come home. They had pop-in NBA 2K21 MT Coins -- the 2009 edition of the NBA-based video sport -- and would basketball online. Five-on-five virtual games. On the weekends, the same thing. Play all weekend. Rack up stats. Come home, log in to NBA 2K and game. Again and again. Day daily. Week after week. Weekend after weekend.

It was a competitive time using countless thousands competing on the web. Shaka, whose speech has been"YoungSparks92," saw someone climbing the ranks with him. "YoungKobe3." Both New Yorkers were connected together then. Little did they know that almost a decade after they would be teammates, competing side by side for the Utah Jazz at a professional league for NBA 2K gamers.

See, at the moment, it was about rankings. They climbed the ladder up. Shaka had the bragging rights -- always ahead of Lotty. So when Lotty discovered both NBA 2K stars grew up in the Exact Same area of Mount Vernon, New York. He knew he had to fight him. 1 match to decide bragging rights for town and 2K. They went to different high schools, therefore it was not like they could link up by themselves. However they had mutual friends, so the match was set up.

Shaka wanted the opportunity to play with Lotty one on one. He always knew he was a better player than him, even if they were always neck-and-neck at the competitive positions. He only wanted the moment to prove it. They played with a hard-fought game. The match was close, but Shaka won by 10 or so.

After that night, both competitors -- who had never met until that point -- ended up going to the movies. Fast forward more than a decade and the two are still side by side, teaming together on Jazz Gaming, the Utah Jazz affiliate for its NBA 2K League. "When we discovered that we were from precisely the exact same neighborhood and we're both on top of the world, such as, wow, that is mad we will need to start hanging out and talking about the sport to Cheap MT NBA 2K21 kind of learn from each other," Shaka said. "And we just became teammates then."