Rick Welts, former longtime Pres. of the Warriors, in a 2025 interview: “Whenever we felt too good about our success, I reminded Joe Lacob & Peter Guber, the primary owners who hired me, ‘You bought a team that already had Steph Curry on the roster. Your chances for success were greatly enhanced.’”
Source: https://www.leadershipmattersshow.com/episodes/rick-welts
> Alan Fleischmann: “With the Warriors, building culture and a unique organization was clearly a big part of the transformation—three championships in five years. Was culture central?“
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> Rick Welts: “One hundred percent. The Warriors had a culture of losing—in the locker room and in the business office. It became business as usual and accepted: pretty good gig, season ends in April, you get a nice summer vacation, everybody gets a raise, and you do it all over again. Players had no expectations of success.
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> The big cultural shift started with Mark Jackson, our coach when I arrived. He began changing the locker room culture. We started to have players who believed they could win instead of expecting to lose. We also started getting wins on the business side, and people began to believe the “crazy guy” [Welts] who put everyone in a conference room on day one and said, “Here’s what this can be. We’re going to be winners. If you’ve been here a long time and don’t believe it, this might be a good time to part ways. But if you want to jump on the bandwagon, this is what this can be.”
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> Whenever we felt too good about our success, I reminded Joe Lacob and Peter Guber, the primary owners who hired me, “You bought a team that already had Steph Curry on the roster. Your chances for success were greatly enhanced.” He wasn’t yet the Steph Curry we know—he was a skinny kid with bad ankles—but fast forward and he’s one of the truly great players in NBA history.”