A startling statistic shows that mediocrity is back to square one
The The Atlanta Hawks played somewhat improved basketball lately, winners of four straight games to get back to the .500 mark. The addition by Jonathan Kuminga gave Atlanta a significant boost of energy over the past week, even though the team is currently on an extremely light schedule.
The Hawks have hovered around .500 the last few years and are poised to make a playoff appearance again this season. However, the franchise is the tradition of mediocrity it goes far beyond the current era.
“The Hawks are not only 31-31 in their last 62 games, but … 45-45 in their last 90, 67-67 in their last 134, 174-174 in their last 348, 210-210 in their last 420, 785-785 in their last 1,540, 3,880 and 2,895-2,895 in the last 5,790,” reported Automatic on X, formerly Twitter, citing a post by Kevin Chouinard on Twitter.
This installment of the games takes things back to the 1950s, long before the franchise even settled in Atlanta.
The Hawks, of course, haven’t been around .500 for every year of their existence, as the 1980s team with Dominique Wilkins fielded some very good teams, and some really rotten teams in the early 2000s.
In the late 2000s through the early 2010s, the Hawks were a perennial team coming out of the first or second round of the playoffs, with Joe Johnson and Al Horford at the helm. A 60-win campaign in 2014-15 proved to be a blip on the radar.
Atlanta hoped the emergence of Trae Young would lead the team to a sustained era of prosperity on the heels of their run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2020-21, but the Hawks were never able to approach those heights again during Young’s tenure, eventually trading him for the unceremonious Washington Wizards.
The Hawks are hoping that young players like Jalen Johnson and Deason Daniels, and maybe now Cummings, can finally break the curse of mediocrity that has plagued the franchise’s existence.
2026-03-03 18:12:00
