Ideal time for Hawks to take off
By
Mark Bradley | Tuesday, October 16, 2007, 07:12 PM
Nature abhors a vacuum, and our pro sports scene is approaching vacuum status. “The Falcons used to be the team with Michael Vick, but he’s gone and they’re struggling,” Josh Smith says. “The Braves haven’t made the playoffs the last two years, and the Thrashers are off to a slow start.”
That leaves Smith’s team, and we’ve been conditioned to laugh hard and long whenever that forlorn franchise is mentioned. We should stop laughing. The Hawks are now our best hope.
Yes, the Hawks.
Yes, really.
The marketplace is wide open, and the Hawks finally seem to have something worth buying. “No question about it,” says Dominique Wilkins, who’s the club’s vice president and who was, 22 years ago, part of a team that rose up and made Atlanta take notice. “This is a prime opportunity for us.”
For the first time this century, a warm little buzz has attached itself to the franchise that has endured a long nuclear winter. The Hawks are seen as having had, miracle of miracles, a very good draft. There’s a growing belief that the process of rebuilding, which has moved at a glacial pace, is nearing its blessed end.
“I do think this is a playoff team, barring injuries,” Wilkins says, and the Hawks, as we know too well, haven’t reached the postseason since 1999. “People say the [NBA] East has improved, and it has, but we’re one of the teams that has gotten better.”
Practice games aren’t usually worth mentioning, but in the current climate — Braves falling short, Thrashers falling flat, Falcons falling apart — it must be noted that the Hawks won their first three exhibitions. Wilkins again: “We like the situation we’re in. This is a different team, a different atmosphere.”
This isn’t to say the masses have embraced the Hawks already or will anytime soon. This, remember, is Atlanta. Stan Kasten, once the president of every local pro team save the Falcons, used to say that Atlantans needed about a year to catch on even after a team starts to win. Indeed, that’s what happened with the 1985-86 Hawks.
They weren’t expected to do anything, but they arrayed three draftees — Spud Webb, John Battle and, yes, Jon Koncak — alongside young players like Wilkins and Doc Rivers and Randy Wittman and Kevin Willis and Cliff Levingston and Antoine Carr, and by New Year’s the Hawks were above .500 and getting stronger. They finished 50-32 and made the playoffs and beat Detroit in Round 1, but attendance didn’t exactly spike. Only three regular-season home games (two against the Celtics, one against the Lakers) sold out. On April 10, 1986, Wilkins scored 57 points before an audience of 9,902 at the 16,000-seat Omni.
But, come 1987 and 1988 and 1989, the Hawks were the biggest game in town. (It helped that the Braves and Falcons were moribund.) “People weren’t quite used to it [at first],” Wilkins says. “But I remember arriving at the airport during that Boston series [in 1988], and there being thousands of people to meet us. People really tripped to us. Atlanta’s always been like that — if you get their respect, they will support you.”
Josh Smith, the burgeoning power forward, is a lifelong Atlantan. He doesn’t recall the 1985-86 season for a basic logistical reason: “I was just coming into this world.” He can, however, sense a difference in the way people are regarding his team. “I go to different malls,” he says, “and it’s like people are waiting for us to explode. … This town is waiting for a team to explode, and I believe we can do it.”
If nothing else, the Hawks have at least ceased being a tired punch line. There’s an air of expectation, as opposed to a cloud of abject dread, ringing the team that has over the past eight seasons finished an aggregate 220 games under .500. Says Smith, smiling: “I’d be happy if everybody is just talking about the Hawks in a positive light.”
Everybody isn’t. Not yet. But a few folks are, and there’s a chance that number will expand over the next six months. There’s a chance the club nobody has been willing to claim will soon be the people’s choice.
Ideal time for Hawks to take off
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