i know about VC's touching up their replays (as a lot of games clean up their real-time graphics for any kind of cut scene) but whos to say that this session wasnt played previously and then replayed using the replay option? in past nba 2ks when you did a play and manually replayed it yourself through the options there wouldnt be any visual enhancements, so thats a possibility. even though usually only a play is replayed at a time, whos to say that they didnt just replay a big more. if it was 1up.com or gamespot.com saying that this was 100% gameplay then i would have my doubts, but ign for the most part have shown that they know what they are talking about.
like it was said before i expect the final game to look this good if not better during gameplay, am i setting my expectations too high? i dont think so, after all this is only a launch title and again only a glimpse to what the 360 can really do.