Does it matter how many seconds are left before jumping into the game? i.e. if its 10 seconds do you not get VC?
Nope, in fact the shortest the better.
My general rule of thumb is to jump in as soon as the clock shows something lower than a single possession time, so under 24 sec.
Go in simcast, simulate, right joystick all the way to the right (max sim speed), when it its around 1min left on 4th quarter right joystick all the way to the left (min sim speed) and stop the counter as soon as you see it tick under 20 sec.
The worse case scenario is a close draw and then you get stuck in a endless loop of forced fouls, but it happens very rarely in my experience with the warriors, first match is against rockets and its almost never close
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Does not matter. So many times i tried to be cute instead of going in at 17 seconds, I tried to sim it down further and it ended ha.
So-many-times. We're greedier than 2k hahah.
Edit:
Very important if you're playing the PC version.
When going back to the main menu be careful when deleting your saves, for some reason once I was too fast and it loaded briefly my my career saves and I accidentally deleted a 75 OVR alt, it felt very bad. Now I take a split second to check what I'm deleting instead of going full muscle memory.