Atlanta Hawks
Atlanta Hawks
The Atlanta Hawks are an American professional basketball franchise based in Atlanta, Georgia. They are part of the Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference in the National Basketball Association (NBA). They play their home games at Philips Arena.
Their origins can be traced to the establishment of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks in 1946, a member of the National Basketball League. In 1949, they joined the National Basketball Association (NBA) as part of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America merger. In 1951, the team moved to Milwaukee, where they changed their name to the Hawks. The team moved again in 1955 to St. Louis, where they won their only NBA championship in 1958. The Hawks moved to Atlanta in 1968.
The Hawks currently own the second-longest drought (behind the Sacramento Kings) of not winning an NBA championship at 56 seasons. All the franchise’s NBA Finals appearances and lone NBA championship occurred when the team was based in St. Louis. Meanwhile, for 48 years, they never advanced past the second round of the playoffs in any format, until finally breaking through with their first Eastern Conference Finals berth in 2015. Much of the failure they’ve experienced in the postseason can be traced back to their poor history in the NBA draft. Since 1980, the Hawks have drafted only four players who have been chosen to play in an All-Star game (Doc Rivers, Kevin Willis, Al Horford, and Jeff Teague; Dominique Wilkins was actually selected by the Utah Jazz and traded to the Hawks a few months after the draft). Horford and Teague are the only All-Star Hawks to have been drafted since Willis was selected in 1984, and Horford is also the only first-rounder the Hawks selected in their nine-year playoff drought to play in an NBA All-Star Game.
