Inside the Chicago Bulls’ Easter–egg–filled schedule release video

Some East Coast basketball fans are still reliving the recent NBA Finals. For everyone else, there’s a new season to look forward to—and the schedule for the upcoming season is officially out.

Schedule release day has become something of a holiday for NBA fans, as well as fans of other leagues, like the NFL and WNBA. This season, every NBA team dropped some kind of schedule release content—but not all of them were slam dunks (the Toronto Raptors, for instance, ruffled some feathers with their gossip podcast parody video).

The Chicago Bulls’ video game–inspired schedule release video, which was packed with local references and NBA Easter eggs, seems to be a rare example of sports social content that’s largely lauded in the comments, with multiple “well done”s and calls for the content team to get raises.

Less than 24 hours after it dropped, the video had accumulated more than 1.1 million views across platforms, the fourth most among NBA teams, according to data from content intelligence company Mondo Metrics and the Sponcon Sports newsletter. (FWIW, the Raptors’ video came in at No. 7, with over 900,000 views.)

We spoke with Luka Dukich, the Bulls’ VP of content marketing, about how his team pulled it off.

“We make it for the group chat,” he told us. “For us, the schedule release is just an opportunity to be uninhibited.”

Animation nation

Dukich said his team starts officially brainstorming the coming season’s schedule release around April, around the time that NFL schedule content starts rolling out. The Bulls content staff—led by Digital Content Director Nikko Tan—tend to use that league’s content for inspiration, Dukich said, and they also keep a running doc with ideas dating back three or four years.

The idea to use Grand Theft Auto as inspiration came up a few years back and didn’t get used right away, Dukich said, but with the much-anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI scheduled for later this year, it made sense to circle back. The Bulls have dabbled in animated schedule release videos before, with a Pokémon theme for the 2023-24 season that became a viral hit, so there wasn’t much concern about not using live players and other talent.

“It gives us space to play and do different things that are harder to do if you’re doing an actual, physical shoot,” Dukich said. Video-game culture is widespread and often nostalgic, “and there’s all these little callbacks that people get really excited about,” he told us. “You don’t even have to be a Bulls fan to watch that and get excited.”

Chi-town

While the video takes place in a GTA-like universe, it’s also heavily Chicago-coded. It started with the cast: Bulls mascot Benny the Bull, who is a huge part of the brand, has more TikTok followers than the Bulls’ official account, and “feels like a natural video-game character, anyway,” Dukich said. In the video, Benny navigates the city on a mission to pick up the schedule from Bulls forward Matas Buzelis.

“Meet me at the top of the Sears Tower so I can give it to you,” Buzelis says over the phone.

The Sears Tower reference is one of several Chicago Easter eggs: The iconic building is called the Willis Tower now, but many Chicagoans still use the old name. Benny also starts at the United Center, travels to the Loop in downtown Chicago, and passes by the Chicago River.

“There’s those little things where it just feels really natural,” Dukich said. “There’s a car just littered with parking tickets, as we have all experienced, having driven in Chicago…You see all the locations, but there’s also just a really Chicago feel to it, and I think that’s the stuff that’s real and that resonates.”

All love

The video is also chock-full of NBA references, from player name-drops spanning multiple teams to some truly “deep-cut NBA culture jokes,” Dukich said, including a reference to Bill Simmons’s legendary colonoscopy on the day Jaylen Brown was traded from the Boston Celtics to the Philadelphia 76ers, and the Pacers couple that went viral for arguing, apparently about the value of a liberal arts education, at a game. In other words, IYKYK.

“That’s the stuff that gets you to watch it multiple times to try to see, ‘What did I miss?’” Dukich said. “That’s what makes the best type of schedule release.”

The Bulls content team is largely focused on brand-oriented goals over hard business metrics like ticket sales, which means stats like watch time are important to them, Dukich said. Getting people to spend time with team content can be difficult, though, given the cluttered nature of the sports content ecosystem and shortening attention spans, and especially during the offseason.

But as of Aug. 20, about a week after the video dropped, the Bulls’ schedule release had over 150,000 engagements and almost 4 million impressions, Dukich told us, plus a slew of positive comments.

“We got people talking about and engaging with the Bulls in the middle of August,” he said. “That’s such a win. It brought a little smile and happiness to a bunch of people, and that’s a pretty cool feeling.”