You and me are on the same wavelength lol. I made a thread for this
here, and recently hinted at repurchasing the game in one of Andrew's articles. I just received my copy today for about $3 total off eBay (complete in box) for PS3; I owned it back in the day.
Thoughts years later: the game speed is a problem - your players fly way too fast across the court while using turbo. Honestly, the default non-turbo movement should be the sprint, and there should be a slowed walking animation. I was hoping there would be a game speed slider that I could lower as I was aware of this before purchase, but there is none. Secondly, I really wish there were custom control presets, because if I start a Franchise and actually consistently play this game it's going to mess with my 2K skills, since the controls vary considerably. Nothing is actually wrong with them; just a personal gripe. Believe it or not, I was actually considering making a Franchise story of this game in the stories section as a sort of surprise, but there is no way.
You mentioned the jumpshots looking nice; every player actually has the same release, ditto free throw.
By far my favorite exclusive mode to this game is the Skills Challenge. You can find a couple of videos of it on YouTube. No other NBA video game series has had it, and I just had a blast completing its three goals. My only complaint is in some scenarios it just warps you to the next station. The game also has the TNT scoreboard/overlays, which is awesome.
Overall I recommend picking this game up on PS3 if you can find it for under $5 just to see what it's like and to add it to your collection. It's a forgotten piece of NBA history, and not half bad considering when it was released. I feel like they kind of reached a tipping point/roadblock with this iteration and could no further, as this game doesn't vary much from NBA 08. As I said in the other thread, I would be so game to see what NBA 19 would look like, given the success of The Show.
A good way to put this game is if you let two CPU's run a demo it looks really solid (like better than NBA Live looked at the time), but if it's two humans playing together it will most likely look like a disaster.