What the Atlanta Hawks Have Already Won

For two solid decades, the best compliments that could be paid toward the Atlanta Hawks could also pass for cocktail party banter about a table centerpiece. They clearly belonged, and were present without upsetting the balance of their surroundings. The construction generally reflected a proper understanding of balance. The color scheme was visually appealing. And then it's on to more appetizing items.

There just wasn't much of substance to say, because there wasn't much substance to the Hawks. The Hawks were what three-quarters of a billion dollars looked like at its most drab, routinely knocking on the door of the playoffs only to meekly show themselves out a round or two later. They seemed not just consigned to this faint and dull respectability, but built for it.

Five years ago, their best player was Joe Johnson, who in spite of his seven All-Star Games never flirted with genuine greatness so much as he stole glances at it and then sidled on down the avenue; he benefitted from circumstance and the era he played in as much as natural ability. Six years before that, it was Shareef Abdur-Rahim, better identified for his one great shortcoming—it took him nine-and-a-half years to finally crawl into the playoffs—than the clanging and banging he brought to the post every night. Five years prior to Abdur-Rahim was Dikembe Mutombo, the closest thing the Hawks had to a star in the years after Dominique Wilkins and still a galaxy away, a defensive savant who would have stood near the absolute pinnacle at his position a decade before or after, but was instead boxed out by his generation's many two-way pivots, including a pair who outshone him at his own alma mater. All three were important in their own way, and no one you know has their jerseys hanging in the closet.

What is Johnson's best moment as a Hawk? How about Abdur-Rahim's? Mutombo's? The absence of an obvious answer is the cost of NBA purgatory; the memories can't slip away, because they were never really there. In some ways, that's a blessing. The Hawks never finished higher than 11th in the East from 1999 through 2007, yet all that really endures from that period is a half-baked ownership squabble. Reach a high enough pain threshold, and numbness becomes a virtue.

That doesn't make it preferable to actually feeling something, though. The Knicks, for instance, are a commercial backcourt violation, a dribbling ode to Comic Sans font, but they generate a great deal of entertainment at their own expense, and their owner's. in many ways that's preferable to the bored landscape inside Philips Arena. We find things in these self-ruining Knicks teams, and those qualities will stand out even more when they inevitably bumble their way back toward competence. New York's failures arrive in widescreen Technicolor; for something like a generation, Atlanta's were monochromatic and low-definition.

As of this writing, the Hawks are four wins away from reaching the NBA Finals, which is the closest the team has been since it played in St. Louis, where they last played during Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

This has been a long time coming; the roster's origins date back to the 2007 drafting of Al Horford, the team's current best player if also no more a big bright star than his predecessors. This team improved by 22 wins in a year's time, doing so with 10 players and a coach who have been in Atlanta for less than three seasons. It feels as though they emerged from obscurity fully formed.

What makes the Hawks most interesting isn't so much that they are finally relevant as the manner in which they arrived there. There was no coronation of a regional savior the way their Conference Finals opponents anointed LeBron James, nor any scepter to pass onto a nominal lieutenant like Kyrie Irving. Atlanta defeated irrelevance by weaponizing the anonymity that defined them for so long, and with a starting lineup that leans on cohesion far more than sustained brilliance.

Four-fifths of that group being named to this year's All-Star team, of course, but still there is no singular icon, here. The most unique of the bunch is Kyle Korver, eternally navigating a labyrinth of picks in search of an opening for his jumper. His career is destined to become an Easter egg buried underneath lines of code, the kind of player that only those who dedicate their whole beings to today's game will remember after everyone moves on to newer editions.

That is, unless the Hawks win the title. A cadre of basketball thinkers is hoping they do exactly that, the better to wave them around as red-and-white proof that a team can become champions in the absence of a superstar-caliber scorer. That the Hawks are subject of such hypotheticals is proof that they already achieved the overarching success that truly matters. They are discussed and consumed, they matter, and the ultimate outcome of this playoff run, whatever it is, will be remembered.

People will be elated or they will suffer; either, or both. Each permutation represents a victory, the wins and the losses. The Hawks have already won, in some ways—they now matter enough to be considered a focal point within the NBA's power structure, and their approach to building a winner is both legible and new. They are awake, they have already upset the balance of their surroundings, and the playoffs are better for it. No one is turning away from them now.