Atlanta Hawks

Atlanta Hawks, American professional basketball team based in Atlanta. The Hawks were one of the original franchises of the National Basketball Association (NBA) when the league was established in 1949. The team won its only championship in 1958.

Originally founded in Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa, as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks in 1946, the team played in the National Basketball League for three seasons before the founding of the NBA. They relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before the 1951–52 season and shortened their nickname to the “Hawks.” After years of middling success, the Hawks drafted future Hall of Famer Bob Pettit with the second overall pick of the 1954 NBA draft, and the team’s fortunes began to improve. The Hawks moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1955 and advanced to the NBA Finals after the 1956–57 season, where they lost to the Boston Celtics in seven games. The Hawks defeated the Celtics in their finals rematch the following season, earning the first title in franchise history. Although the Hawks returned to the playoffs in all but one of the following 15 seasons, they advanced to the finals only twice, losing to the Celtics on both occasions.

The Hawks were sold to a Georgia-based group in 1968, and they relocated to Atlanta. The early Atlanta teams featured such stars as Pete Maravich, Walt Bellamy, and Lou Hudson. In 1982 the Hawks acquired the most recognizable superstar of its Atlanta years in a post-draft trade that brought rookie Dominique Wilkins into the fold. Wilkins—known as “the Human Highlight Film” because of his impressively acrobatic slam dunks—led the Hawks to four consecutive 50-win seasons in the 1980s and made his mark as one of the most prolific scorers in NBA history. His individual accomplishments did not lead to postseason success for his team, however, as Atlanta did not advance past the second round of the NBA playoffs in any of his 12 seasons with the Hawks.

The 1999–2000 season was the beginning of the longest playoff drought in Atlanta’s history, but the Hawks returned to postseason play during the 2007–08 season with a young team that pushed the eventual-champion Celtics to seven games in their first-round series. The Hawks remained a perennial postseason presence through the remainder of the first decade of the 21st century, but they did not advance past the second round of the playoffs during that time.

The team had a breakthrough season in 2014–15, winning a franchise-record 60 games and advancing to the Eastern Conference finals (where the Hawks lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers) for the first time since relocating to Atlanta. However, that proved to be a one-season turnaround as the Hawks returned to the pattern of having a second-round ceiling in 2015–16. The team lost many of its key players in the following offseason and limped to a 24-win season and last-place divisional finish in 2017–18.

The Hawks made a fateful decision in the 2018 draft when they initially selected future superstar Luka Dončić but immediately traded him for another prospect, Trae Young, an offensively gifted but undersized guard. That choice seemed sound in Young’s second year with the team, when he led the fifth-seeded Hawks on an unexpectedly deep playoff run, during which the team upset the New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers before falling to the eventual champion, the Milwaukee Bucks, in the Eastern Conference finals.

But the early promise of the Young era in Atlanta has since been overshadowed by increasingly disappointing results, and the Hawks have struggled to build a well-rounded team around their star guard. They lost in the first round of the playoffs in 2022 and 2023 and failed to make the postseason entirely in 2024, the same year that Dončić—by now a perennial Most Valuable Player candidate—led the Dallas Mavericks to a berth in the NBA Finals.