Really good article by Ethan Skolnick on Stan Van Gundy’s mission to turn around the Detroit Pistons franchise. There are a ton of takeaways in here for coaches, but the best stuff is where Stan is talking about culture change.

And while Van Gundy doesn’t mention Smith specifically when riffing about the creation of a new Pistons culture, you don’t beed to dig especially deep to find correlation. He argues that the primary method of culture creation is “the people you put on the roster. At the end of the day, you can say what you want, but guys are going to be who they are. You’ve always got some guys, maybe half your team, who can go either way. If you put them around positive people who are professional and know how to do things, they become positive. And if you don’t, they don’t. And especially when you’ve got the young guys we have. Who they’re around is a lot more important than what I do. A lot more important.”

LINK TO ARTICLE