Where do the Atlanta Hawks rank in B/R’s all-time franchise rankings?

As Boston won its 18th championship this week, there has been much debate over who won it. The best franchise in NBA history is. Is it the Lakers or the Celtics? While this debate doesn’t involve the Hawks, it does spark an interesting discussion about where exactly Atlanta stands among all other franchises in NBA history.

Although the Hawks didn’t win a title in Atlanta, they were fairly consistent winners. A fun exercise by Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey ranked all the franchises historically and Atlanta ranked 20th:

Top five players by winning shares: Bob Pettit, Dominique Wilkins, Cliff Hagan, Lou Hudson and Al Horford

Peak season: 2014–15 (60 wins, conference final losses)

NBA Championships: 1

“Like Sacramento, the Atlanta Hawks have a title dating back to the 1950s and while representing a different city in their history. In 1958, while they were the St. Louis Hawks, Bob Pettit led them to the championship in a campaign that included the Nationals’ Dolph Schayes and the Celtics’ Bill Russell.

Since arriving in Atlanta for the 1968-69 season, the Hawks haven’t had as much success, but they are still middle of the pack with a winning percentage of 2,229-2,290.

They had strong teams with Dominique Wilkins going up against powerful versions of the Celtics. The 60-win team of Al Horford, Paul Millsap and Kyle Korver came up against LeBron James.

Yes, there have been a few playoff droughts here and there, but the Hawks have generally been competitive, even if they’ve never been truly dangerous title threats (much like the current version of the team ).”

Here is the formula by which he established his ranking:

“Here, just to get a basic ranking, we took the 30 active teams and sorted them by the average of their rankings:

Championships won
Winning percentage
Simple scoring system (SRS is a combination of point differential and strength of schedule)
Playoff wins
Playoff winning percentage
We gave a little extra credit to this first category. Consider us among the camp that considers this to be the most important consideration.

However, this alone did not give us the final order. As is the case with our weekly power rankings, there is a touch of subjectivity here. And in the case of this exercise, that subjectivity is influenced by the all-time individual talents present in the franchise history books and by recent organizational stability (or instability).

Another note is that some histories are a bit confusing based on location or team name changes, as well as league changes. For example, the Philadelphia 76ers are credited with winning the championship from the Syracuse Nationals in the 1950s. Ditto for the Oklahoma City Thunder and Seattle SuperSonics championship in 1979. When it comes to league changes, teams like the Indiana Pacers do not credit ABA years. This is strictly NBA performance. »

Ranking franchises that have never won a title is a difficult task and you can rank many of them interchangeably, but I think #20 is a fair ranking. While I think the 2014-2015 team was better, one could argue that the 2020-2021 season could have been the peak for the Hawks. This team also reached the conference finals, but actually won two games instead of being swept. You could also make the argument that if Trae Young hadn’t injured his ankle, they could have beaten Milwaukee and then could have faced the Suns in the NBA Finals.

If this franchise wants to progress in the future, there’s really only one path to get there. Atlanta has been a consistent franchise when it comes to winning, but they have never been able to reach the top.