The gang at 2K Sports are getting more conservative in the overall ratings of scorers who don't contribute much on the defensive end of the court. For this reason, Carlos Boozer's rating is lower than normal, Luol Deng's is slightly up, and Joakim Noah is among the upper echelon of the current players in NBA 2K12, which will be released Oct. 4.

The stock player ratings for the upcoming game leaked via YouTube and was posted at various sites sports gaming sites like here. Bryan Wiedly, who runs the sports gaming site PastaPadre.com, tweeted Bulls players' ratings here.

Only five players have ratings higher than Derrick Rose's 92 -- LeBron James (98), Dwyane Wade (96), Kobe Bryant (94), Dwight Howard (93), and Chris Paul (93) -- with Kevin Durant as the only other player sharing that rating. Noah's 82 rating is only lower than 35 other players in the game, the same as Paul Pierce and Eric Gordon, higher than Chris Bosh and Kevin Love. It's only three points lower than Dirk Nowitzki (85).

Boozer and Deng are at 77, Taj Gibson at 73, Ronnie Brewer at 69, Keith Bogans at 68, and Kyle Korver at 62.

There are two other Bulls in the game with 90+ ratings -- the 1992-93 and 1997-98 versions of Michael Jordan are rated 99, his 1985-86 version is rated 92, and the 1992-93 version of Scottie Pippen in a 92.

All of these rating are extremely preliminary and will begin to get morphed when IRL regular season games begin getting logged, on which roster updates will be based. Recently, 2K Sports confirmed that NBA 2K12 will have no roster updates because of the lockout -- meaning the incoming rookies don't actually exist yet, according to the game, because they're not on NBA rosters yet, as they don't have contracts.

I do wonder a couple of things, though:

1. Are none of the unrestricted free agents in the free agent pool and not on NBA rosters? If they are on rosters, what are their contract details to be used for franchise mode?
2. Normally, once a new version of these games are released, the old ones don't load at all while you're connected to the internet because of the error while it automatically attempts to update the rosters. Will NBA 2K11 will unusable without disconnecting your gaming console from the internet, even though 2kSports.com won't be updating rosters on the 2K12 version?

I should confess that I'm not nearly the sports gamer I once was, but ran into #2 with NBA 2K10 immediately when 2K11 was released. And I admit that I'm selfishly wondering if NBA 2K12 is worth getting before the lockout ends. I'm good with Madden NFL '12 for a while, but with no NHL 2K12, I'll be hurtin' by mid-October.