Insider Article

[AmishBoy]

John Hollinger ranks the NBA franches, but the Hawks is on insider. Can someone please post this?

http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/20...eRankings-Hawks

[Admin]

22

ATLANTA HAWKS: 41.98 POINTS PER SEASON (1949-2009)

Wins: 2,323

Playoff wins: 120

Series wins: 27

Titles: 1

All-Stars: 80

Best player: Bob Pettit

Best coach: Mike Fratello

Best team: 1957-58 (41-31, won NBA title)

"Close but no cigar" has been the Hawks' unofficial motto for more than half a century. Despite their near-constant presence in the postseason, they have won only one title, and that was more than 50 years ago in another city.

The Hawks have been in Atlanta for four decades, but prior to that, they were the league's greatest nomads. Beginning as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks in the original NBA (in the area on the Illinois-Iowa border now known as the Quad Cities), they went to Milwaukee for four years and then fled to St. Louis. The relocation penalty in my formula is why their overall ranking is so low.

It was in the Gateway City that the franchise had its greatest success, led by the criminally underrated Bob Pettit. The Hawks were one of only two teams to wrest a title from Bill Russell's Celtics in a 13-year period, winning four games by a combined eight points to outlast Boston 4-2 in the 1958 NBA Finals and claim the franchise's only championship.

The Hawks made three other trips to the Finals under Pettit but never got past Boston, with the biggest stinger being the double-OT loss in Game 7 in Boston Garden in 1957. Adding insult to injury was the fact that they'd traded Russell to Boston in the first place for Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan; had the Hawks paired Russell and Pettit, they almost assuredly would have won several championships.

Just as painful, perhaps, were the seven times they lost in the conference finals between 1959 and 1970. Those years included some good post-Pettit teams led by Lou Hudson, Joe Caldwell and Walt Bellamy, but they never could get past the Lakers in the then-Western Conference.

You'll notice we're mostly discussing ancient history, and there's a reason for that. The first two years in Atlanta, 1969 and 1970, were the only two the Hawks made it to the conference finals, much less challenged for more. They had strong runs in the 1980s thanks to the aerial exploits of Dominique Wilkins and the coaching of Mike Fratello, winning 50 games four straight seasons, but never got past the Celtics; it was a similar story in the 1990s for the Dikembe Mutombo-Steve Smith-Mookie Blaylock crew that was no match for the Bulls.

The new century saw an eight-year playoff drought -- the only extended absence in the franchise's history -- before the Hawks revived in 2008 and lost again in the conference semifinals in 2009. They now have met that fate 15 times since 1965.