Original marquee signing Tom Scully labels it a burning desire to bring sustained success to the Giants, who  spent years as  whipping boys but  now stand one game from an AFL grand final.

Scully has bought in. He re-signed earlier this year to stay in western Sydney until at least 2021.

Superstar midfielder Stephen Coniglio has bought in. He followed Scully during the week, adding two years to his existing deal and  keeping him at the Giants until 2019.

Callan Ward will be there for as long as Scully, while Shane Mumford, Nick Haynes and Lachie Whitfield lengthened their tenures earlier this season. "We haven't spoken about it as a group but I don't think we need to speak about it," Scully said.

"We've tried to create a culture at the club that instils confidence in the players that this is the right club to be at. Guys can see that pretty clearly and I think it's reflective of the fact that so many of the guys have re-signed and have committed to the football club.

"They want to see their future here because it's going to give themselves the best chance to play in a successful side.

"It's a real club where players want to be and we hope that more guys want to re-sign in the future. We also hope it's an attractive club for other players from clubs maybe looking to come and play with us. There's no reason why the Giants can't be a destination club.

"We are aiming and striving for genuine success, sustained success."

Last weekend's six-goal win over the highly fancied Swans at ANZ Stadium marked a coming of age for the Giants.

It was the club's first test in a final, against the cross-town minor premiers who went into the game as flag favourites and came out of it battered, bruised and with a hefty question mark hovering over them.

That game was also a significant validation for Scully. He knew long ago that his heart-wrenching decision to leave Melbourne for GWS was the right one, but this proved it.

We must not forget this man is still only 25.

The natural thing is lump Scully in with the more experienced brigade given he was around before the Giants began in the AFL, but he only had two seasons at the Demons before moving to Sydney.

Scully managed 21 games in his rookie season after being taken with the first pick in the 2009 draft, and being handed the famous No.31 jersey worn by Ron Barassi.

Second-season syndrome hit in a big way in 2011 as injury and intense speculation about his future affected Scully's performances.

There were rumours swirling that he would leave Melbourne long before he committed to the Giants on a six-year deal reportedly worth $6 million.

"It was a really challenging year for myself just to try to balance out, to get my body right, I was struggling for form and the constant speculation over my future was quite difficult to balance," Scully said.

"It was an incredibly tough decision to leave Melbourne for the fact that they did pick me at number one. Not only myself, there was a number of other young guys that they'd gone to the draft and selected and obviously hoped that they could turn the club's future around and get them back on the right track.

Big move: Tom Scully at the announcement of his switch to GWS with Kevin Sheedy in 2011. Photo: Brendan Esposito

"It [moving to GWS] was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In this day and age with the 18 clubs now, we're probably not going to see another expansion team for a long time. To be given that opportunity to come up to a football club, to be there from the very start and to be part of something that not too many people can say they were part of is certainly something that appealed to me.

"It's probably been one of the best moves that I've done just in terms of putting myself out of my comfort zone and trying to create a life in a foreign city where I hadn't spent much time before."

When Scully arrived the club was an exotic mix of fresh draftees, experienced heads plucked from around the league and one of the game's great coaches in Kevin Sheedy overseeing the operation. Facilities were poor, floggings were substantial and the future very cloudy.

"There's some great stories," Scully recalls of those bleak early years. "At Blacktown they were just temporary facilities, sometimes we'd be training out on a baseball field that didn't even have the dimensions of an oval, it was like a diamond.

"We were out there kicking the ball around, trying not to roll our ankles on the mound. We were still travelling to Rooty Hill RSL to do weights.

Starting out: Tom Scully began his AFL career as a Melbourne Demon. Photo: Paul Rovere

"Guys like Chad [Cornes] and Dean Brogan who had come from Port Adelaide and done well before in their career, they'd come up and were thinking 'Gee where the hell are we, we're in the middle of Blacktown, we don't even have a proper training facility'. The transformation of the club over the last four or five years has been phenomenal.

"All the players that have been there since the very start who experienced the early days have just such a great appreciation for what we have now. Our facilities now are first rate and we certainly don't take anything for granted."

Underneath it all, that unspoken commitment continues to bubble.

Head of football Wayne Campbell said during the week that the re-signing of Coniglio should encourage even more of the club's young stars to extend their deals. And why wouldn't they?

There's a premiership dangling in front of GWS this year. If the Giants don't grab it this time around, it will still be in reach for at least a decade as this battle-hardened and no longer humiliated playing list continues to mature.

That's why Scully moved up here five years ago.