CHICAGO — Much like how every snowflake is unique, so too is each NBA rebuild.

On Tuesday night, the Chicago Bulls, who are either in the early stage of a new tank job or in the 10th season of an extended rebuilding plan, hosted the Oklahoma City Thunder, who set a modern NBA standard on how quickly you can go from the outhouse to the penthouse.

While you can’t replicate a team’s path, can the Bulls learn from how Oklahoma City did it?

Sure, the Reinsdorfs first need to fire Artūras Karnišovas and replace him with Sam Presti. Next, have Billy Donovan resign and replace him with Mark Daigneault. And then have Presti draft and trade for some really good players. Boom, cha-ching, the Bulls are fixed.

But seriously, folks …

“Every situation is different,” Daigneault said before the game. “Situations change based on a million different things, a million factors. Our success is a lot of work and certainly a lot of work by our players. But we’ve had luck, and I’m very careful because of that to come up here and give any sort of advice or speak from a level of standing that I don’t think is appropriate. So, their situation is different than ours, and you need good fortune in a lot of different ways, and we’ve had it.”

Daigneault is being humble. The Thunder, the defending NBA champs and in first place again, have earned their luck.

The Bulls have not. After the previous regime started a rebuild by trading Jimmy Butler and breaking up the “Three Alphas,” they didn’t get a top pick. Though they drafted some decent players, they surrounded them with maximum chaos and bad coaching.

In 2020, after the team changed the front office and added Donovan as coach, the Bulls got the No. 4 pick and took … Patrick Williams. The Bulls’ new “brain trust” then traded two first-round picks to the Orlando Magic for Nikola Vučević. And after Williams had a slow start to his career, they extended him for $90 million.

The list of questionable decisions is long, but now the Bulls (25-37) are starting over again. At least they aren’t half-stepping this time around. They are losing. Ethically and decidedly.

The Bulls went 0-for-February, losing 11 straight games before starting off March with a win over the Bucks. Against a short-handed Thunder team, they might have started a new losing streak with a 116-108 defeat. They now have the ninth-worst record in the NBA and a 20.3 percent chance of a top-four pick.

While some teams become laughingstocks for being perennial losers, Chicago has been a butt of jokes in the NBA for how it’s handled the last few seasons, seemingly comfortable with being a Play-In Tournament participant. But give Karnišovas credit for one thing: He apparently knows how to tank.

After putting together yet another near-.500 team this season, he promptly tore it down to the studs, making seven trades that sent out impending free agents and brought in a slew of mismatched guards, thus making it nigh-impossible for Donovan, who left OKC as it embarked on its new path, to squeeze into another Play-In.

Tanking is perhaps the No. 1 storyline in the NBA, thanks to a host of undeniably awful teams in the cellar of the standings and a deep draft with four possible studs at the top. Six teams came into Tuesday with fewer than 20 wins. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is thinking of ways to combat the bad press the league is getting, without much success.

There are two ways to look at tanking. It’s indeed borderline fraudulent to lose on purpose, but it’s also irresponsible, in certain situations, not to. The fans get it. The players get it. Everyone understands. You build through the draft, and one player can change a franchise. The more swings you take in the first round, the more potential hits you can get.

NBA teams have been tanking as long as there has been a reward for losing. The draft lottery was created 40-some years ago as an antidote, but it hasn’t really worked.

In terms of doing it the right way, no one has tanked more efficiently in recent years than Oklahoma City, which lost for two seasons, but even then had a coach and core players trying to win. Meanwhile, Presti traded All-Star types while they still had value, collected draft picks and built a war chest that allowed flexibility while giving him a cushion to make mistakes.

Oklahoma City’s rebuild began in the summer of 2019, when the Thunder got five first-round picks, two pick swaps and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for Paul George. That same summer, the Thunder received two protected first-round picks and two pick swaps from the Rockets in the Russell Westbrook-Chris Paul trade.

For all the draft picks Presti has collected in recent years, the Thunder have only picked in the top five once — when they took Chet Holmgren with the second pick in 2022. In the same draft, they took Jalen Williams at No. 12. (Not to be confused with Jaylin Williams, a second-round pick in that same draft.) And yet, they’re now the ideal NBA franchise.

While Karnišovas has started collecting second-round picks like Pokémon cards, he’s yet to show the craftiness to acquire a first-round pick for a star, let alone multiple ones.

Presti’s dominance over Karnišovas was evident in the summer of 2024 trade that sent Alex Caruso to Oklahoma City for Josh Giddey. The Thunder had decided Giddey, the No. 6 overall pick in 2021, was expendable, and they desired Caruso as a role player to help them win a title, which, of course, he did immediately. Karnišovas, despite having the leverage, couldn’t get the Thunder to include a draft pick with Giddey.

Giddey, who has improved his game with age, is now one of the Bulls’ core players for Karnišovas to build around, along with 2024 first-round pick Matas Buzelis and, hopefully for Chicago, last year’s first-round pick Noa Essengue (who is injured) and whomever they draft this summer.

For the Bulls to figure things out, they need these incumbent players to provide a foundation. That’s one thing any team can take from Oklahoma City. You have to start with something.

Oklahoma City had Lu Dort, Gilgeous-Alexander and locker-room glue guy Kenrich Williams on the roster when they tore it down. All three are still there.

“I give those guys a lot of credit because they’re not only the guys that I thought were carrying that back then, but they’ve been the through line as we’ve gone through six years,” Daigneault said. “And a lot of the stuff that has carried over, it’s carried over because of them.”

Because the Bulls don’t have an abundance of first-round picks, they have to hit on the ones they get. As their tank rolls on, they’ll need a rebuilding team’s secret weapon: luck. And not the kind that Daigneault talks about.

Chicago hasn’t had true draft luck since 2008, when it turned a 1.7 percent chance into Derrick Rose.

The Bulls retired Rose’s No. 1 on Jan. 25, and they also won that night, improving to 23-22. Since then, they’ve won just one game, which upped their odds of drafting their next D-Rose.

Sometimes, you make your own good fortune.