I disagree with the premise of that post entirely. Its a cop out on autonomy and professional responsibility. It is possible to perform well in a bad organization
It is entirely possible to perform well in a bad organization as an individual. THAT is precisely a coping mechanism -> an individual removes his performance from the collective so that he can receive satisfaction from his individuality -> this is precisely what the losing culture means, you HAVE to separate your individual performance from the team performance in order to cope with constant losing. A player can't be heart-broken after every loss year after year when the losing is constant, so they focus more on their individual superficial performance, "content with losing" is what it looks like to an outsider from a winning organization, because in that organization after a loss everyone would feel deeply like crap, but if you lose for 4 or 5 years straight all the time, you have to focus on something else, like how YOU looked on the ice with little regard for how that tied into winning or losing.
In ANY organization players are encouraged, especially young players, to do exactly the opposite. They are instructed (and certainly "growing up" has something to do with this as well as a simple function of age) in the polar opposite direction to strip their individuality in favor of team success. The historical Devils team are the best and most extreme example of that, in fact that is a Lou Lamoriello quote -> they expect their players to give up on their identity as individuals in favor of the team concept.
Q: Describe the traits you look for in a Lou Lamoriello hockey player?
A: Total commitment. . .give up your own identity for the good of the team. . .and, I guess, respect (your) teammate.
http://nypost.com/2012/06/07/serbys-qa-with-lou-lamoriello/
Now I doubt you will ever get quite the same extreme variation of the old Devils teams in modern hockey, but LA is probably the closest as far as winning teams go and Lombardi was a Lamoriello "student". "Broke" teams like Nashville and Phoenix outperformed their talent level for years with a similar concept.
To go back to it, in a bad organization players are content to perform well individually separated from team success. In good organizations, players achieve satisfaction by tying themselves to winning. The satisfaction comes from what you have contributed to a winning organization, even if sometimes superficial individual optics suffer from it.
The common but simplified: play two-way hockey, play "the right way" are short descriptions of this process where young players substitute the pleasure they get primarily from deking someone out, offense-only type of game, flash, point totals and the typical stuff that one grows up dreaming of on the pond for a more complete "what am I contributing shift-to-shift in all areas of the ice and how does that tie into winning" thinking that suits well the NHL level.
So to simplify, it's not completely black and white, but well-run organizations certainly to various degrees promote the stripping of individuality in favor of team success (or rather promote the type of thinking where players are concerned with how their play ties into team success rather than how they "looked like" as individuals in isolation) while losing organizations end up going in the exactly opposite direction, because they have already been exposed to so much losing players remove their contribution from the team's performance as a collective and move more into individual performance and the optics of themselves as a player in isolation. So at the end of the day it isn't anymore so much a question of how much did you contribute to a win, it is simply more of a question of how did I look as an individual.
These are obviously correlated to some degree (if you look good as an individual you probably had a positive impact on the team as well to some degree), but losing culture basically means that most of the players on the team have ceased operating as a collective and instead look at themselves in isolation and their performance in isolation and that happens as a function of all the losing experienced on the team level.
You can say that the Oilers have pretty much bombed on all aspects be it drafting, development (although this part is certainly affected by "culture"), pro-scouting, player acquisitions, signings, whatever. Sure that all has to get addressed but if you don't address the culture as well, you STILL won't have a Cup contender even if the previously mentioned departments are decent. What you'll likely end up with is at best a Washington Capitals under Bruce Boudreau type of team (and I know some will say it was only Halak getting hot blahblah, I firmly believe that team NEVER wins the Cup as it was). My opinion is that the Oilers management went into the rebuild with a very naive outlook on how a rebuild actually works past asset accumulation, ignoring or failing to cultivate the needed "culture", well in reality they might have failed at both, but if you look at this internal audit and what's going to happen from this point on as a sort of "reset" in the process of rebuilding, you HAVE to make sure that the "culture" aspect of it will get addressed too or you will again fail. The very best you can do in that instance is a paper tiger with a lot of talent ala Washington Capitals few years ago that will continuously still fall short to teams that have both the talent and the culture, and that's best case scenario. Again IMO: the grand failure of the "rebuild" regime has been the complete failure on the grounds of instilling structure and a competitive team that plays fundamentally sound hockey even if its temporarily over-matched as it goes through the rebuilding process.
