nitetrain8603 wrote:HomoSapien hit the nail on the head. It's to make Chicago an attractive destination. Brooklyn wasn't attractive when Billy King was finally let go. They were reminiscent of Chicago, except without the coach or Zach LaVine. So even worse. Brooklyn knew no one was coming. Sean Marks decided to get to step 4, he needed to get through steps 1-3. And he did. He made Brooklyn attractive by building a competitive team of misfits, then slowly gathered assets. KD and KI looked at them as a team with a culture and identity. That's why in the end, they chose Brooklyn over the Knicks.
Houston under Daryl Morey. He inherited a broken down Yao and Tracy McGrady. What did he do? Same as Brooklyn would do years later. He didn't skip a step. He knew if he wanted Houston to be attractive, he needed to build some type of culture and competitiveness. He combined that with being aggressive to get Harden. Now, while that ended badly, they also got a good 8 years out of Harden in his prime. They competed for a chip. They were able to attract other players - Dwight, CP3.
And this is not a recent thing either. Miami - constant first round exits after their championship. They had a bad roster, but they instilled a culture of competitiveness. Now, everyone knew that Riley had a reputation of not wanting to tank and lose on a regular basis. He was making trades that would prevent a tank such as trading for Shawn Marion, signing a broken Jermaine O'Neal, etc. LeBron and Bosh go down there with Wade recruiting due to culture.
Orlando, back in 2000. They got TMac and Grant Hill due to a competitive culture that Pat Williams and Doc Rivers built the year before. They were competing with Darrell Armstrong of all people.
There are countless examples of this in NBA history. Players do not want to play for a bad culture, non-sense type atmosphere. They want their money and they want to ball while knowing their team is going to try to compete. For the past 10 years at least, the Bulls were seen as a clown show.
I agree that culture is important, but it's a weird thing. Under the same FO and Thibs, people would have said the Bulls had a good culture. We got numerous players for less money than they could have gotten elsewhere (Boozer, Dunleavy, Gasol, possibly Korver/Brewer as well).
Culture is a lot about your coach and how good your players are though. I don't think the culture has shifted meaningfully because the Bulls just acquired Vucevic. I do think it probably shifted meaningfully with the change in FO, the hiring of new basketball operations people to build out a larger more respectable staff, hiring minorities in several key positions, the bringing in of a well respected and well liked coach, and improvements on the team.
So yes, I do think culture is important, and I do think it is getting better. I don't think Vuc does much at all for that outside of any impact he simply has on wins and to the extent winning is just a proxy for culture.
