Atlanta Hawks
The Atlanta Hawks are one of the oldest NBA franchises, founded in 1946 as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks (a combined Moline, Illinois / Rock Island, Illinois / Davenport, Iowa franchise). They have won one NBA championship (1958, as the St. Louis Hawks). They have relocated three times, played in five cities, and in 2026 have been based in Atlanta for 58 years. The Hawks have never reached the NBA Finals since the franchise’s 1968 relocation to Atlanta. The current majority owner is Tony Ressler, the co-founder of the private-equity firm Ares Management, who purchased the franchise from the Atlanta Spirit ownership group in 2015 for approximately $850 million.
Founding, the Russell trade, and the 1958 championship
The Tri-Cities Blackhawks played their first National Basketball League season in 1946. They joined the NBA as part of the 1949 BAA-NBL merger. Red Auerbach coached the team for a single season in 1949-50 before leaving for Boston, where he would build the dynasty that the Hawks would lose to repeatedly over the next decade. The franchise moved to Milwaukee in 1951 under owner Ben Kerner, then to St. Louis in 1955.
In April 1956, the Hawks held the second overall pick in the NBA Draft. They selected Bill Russell out of the University of San Francisco and immediately traded him to Boston for Cliff Hagan and Ed Macauley, both future Hall of Famers and both players Kerner wanted for immediate competitive return. Russell went on to win eleven championships in Boston. The trade is the most consequential single transaction in franchise history, and it set up an asymmetric rivalry: the Hawks and Celtics played in four NBA Finals from 1957 to 1961, and the Celtics won three of them.
The 1957-58 St. Louis Hawks, coached by Alex Hannum and starring Bob Pettit with Hagan and Macauley alongside him, went 41-31 in the regular season. In the 1958 NBA Finals against Russell’s Boston Celtics, Pettit averaged 29.3 points and 17.0 rebounds. He scored 50 points in the Game 6 clincher. The Hawks won the series 4-2. Russell had injured his ankle in Game 3, which allowed the Hawks to win the middle games. It remains the franchise’s only NBA championship. Pettit was the league’s first official Most Valuable Player (1956) and won the award again in 1959.
The Atlanta move and the Pete Maravich years
The Hawks relocated to Atlanta on May 3, 1968, when Kerner sold the franchise to Tom Cousins and former Georgia Governor Carl Sanders. They became the first NBA franchise in the Deep South. The early Atlanta teams were built around Lou Hudson, a 1966 first-round pick whose #23 the franchise later retired, and Walt Bellamy.
The 1970 NBA Draft brought Pete Maravich third overall out of LSU. The full Maravich biography is here. Maravich played four seasons in Atlanta, averaged 24.3 points per game across that span, made three All-Star teams as a Hawk, and was traded to the expansion New Orleans Jazz in May 1974 in a deal that returned two players and four draft picks. The Maravich era produced two playoff appearances and no series wins.
Ted Turner, the cable-television entrepreneur who had purchased the Atlanta Braves baseball franchise three years earlier, bought the Hawks in 1977. Turner’s ownership stabilized the team through the 1980s and was the reason both franchises remained in Atlanta rather than relocating during the decade’s broader sports-business turbulence.
Hubie Brown coached the Hawks from 1976 to 1981 and won the 1978 NBA Coach of the Year award. Mike Fratello took over in 1983, won the same award in 1986, and coached the franchise through 1990. Both stretches produced consistent playoff teams that ran into either Boston, Detroit, or Milwaukee in the second round.
The Dominique Wilkins era (1982-1994)
Dominique Wilkins, drafted third overall in 1982 out of the University of Georgia, became the face of the franchise for twelve seasons. He won two NBA Slam Dunk Contests (1985 and 1990), made nine All-Star teams, and remains the franchise’s all-time leading scorer with 23,292 regular-season points.
The 1986-87 and 1987-88 Hawks won 57 and 50 games respectively. The 1988 playoffs produced the series that defines the era: a second-round matchup against Larry Bird’s Celtics, decided in Game 7 at Boston Garden on May 22, 1988. Wilkins scored 47 points. Bird scored 34. In the fourth quarter alone, Bird went 9-for-10 from the field and scored 20 points to Wilkins’s 16. Boston won 118-116. It remains the most-replayed Hawks playoff game.
On February 24, 1994, with the Hawks in first place in the Central Division and Wilkins one of the league’s leading scorers, general manager Pete Babcock traded him to the Los Angeles Clippers for Danny Manning. The trade was widely panned at the time. Manning left Atlanta as a free agent that summer. Wilkins’s #21 was retired by the franchise in 2001.
Lenny Wilkens, who had been the Hawks’ starting point guard in the 1958 championship era, returned as head coach in 1993. He won the 1994 Coach of the Year award and coached the franchise through 2000.
The Joe Johnson era (2005-2012)
The 2004 Atlanta Spirit Group, a partnership of nine investors including Bruce Levenson and Michael Gearon Jr., purchased the Hawks (along with the NHL Thrashers and the operating rights to Philips Arena) from Time Warner on March 31, 2004, for approximately $250 million. The first season under the new ownership, 2004-05, the Hawks went 13-69, the worst record in franchise history.
In August 2005, Atlanta acquired Joe Johnson from Phoenix in a sign-and-trade for Boris Diaw and two first-round picks. Johnson made seven consecutive All-Star teams from 2007 to 2014, six of them as a Hawk. The 2007-2012 Hawks built around Johnson, Josh Smith (drafted 17th in 2004), Al Horford (drafted third in 2007), and Mike Bibby (acquired from Sacramento in 2008) made six straight playoff appearances. The 2008 first-round series against the Celtics, who would win the championship that year, went seven games and produced one of the louder closing scenes Philips Arena ever saw.
The 2009-10 Hawks won 53 games. The 2010-11 Hawks beat Orlando in the first round, Atlanta’s first second-round appearance in the post-Wilkins era. Johnson signed a six-year, $123.7 million extension in 2010 that was, at the time, the most expensive contract in franchise history. He was traded to Brooklyn in July 2012 in a deal that returned five players and a first-round pick.
Mike Budenholzer and the 60-win season
Mike Budenholzer, a sixteen-year Gregg Popovich assistant in San Antonio, was hired as head coach in May 2013. The 2014-15 Hawks went 60-22, the franchise’s only sixty-win season. The starting five (Jeff Teague, Kyle Korver, DeMarre Carroll, Paul Millsap, Al Horford) had all four front-court starters selected to the 2015 All-Star Game, the first time in NBA history one team produced four All-Stars in the same season without a single household-name superstar.
The Hawks swept the Brooklyn Nets in the first round and beat the Washington Wizards in six in the second round. They reached the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time since 1970 and were swept by LeBron James’s Cavaliers. It was the only conference finals appearance for the Horford-Millsap-Teague-Korver core, which broke up over the next two summers as each player left in free agency or was traded.
Trae Young, the 2018 draft swap, and the 2021 run
The 2018 NBA Draft produced one of the defining transactions of the modern Hawks era. Atlanta drafted Luka Dončić third overall and immediately traded him to the Dallas Mavericks for Trae Young (drafted fifth) and a protected future first-round pick. The protected pick became the eighth selection in the 2019 draft, used to take Cam Reddish. Dončić has gone on to multiple All-NBA First Team selections. The trade has been re-litigated nearly every season since.
The 2020-21 Hawks, with Young as the 22-year-old star point guard and under first-year interim head coach Nate McMillan (promoted from associate head coach when Lloyd Pierce was fired in March 2021), reached the Eastern Conference Finals and lost to the Milwaukee Bucks in six games. Young’s performance in that playoff run (28.8 points per game through three rounds) was his statistical peak.
In January 2026, with the Hawks falling out of playoff position and Young’s contract structure complicating a long-term build, Atlanta traded Young to the Washington Wizards for CJ McCollum, Corey Kispert, and draft compensation. The Hawks are now operating as one of the more open competitive windows in the league, with a young roster and significant 2026 draft capital.
Current ownership
Tony Ressler purchased the majority share of the Atlanta Hawks in 2015 for approximately $850 million from the Atlanta Spirit ownership group. Ressler is the co-founder and co-chairman of Ares Management Corporation, an American asset-management company. He was a minority owner of the Milwaukee Brewers before purchasing the Hawks. Minority owners include Jami Gertz (the actress and widow of Ressler’s fellow Ares co-founder Antony Ressler), Grant Hill, Jesse Itzler, and Sara Blakely. The Hawks are publicly valued by Forbes (2025) at approximately $2.6 billion.
Retired numbers and legacy
The Hawks have retired five jersey numbers: Bob Pettit (#9), Dominique Wilkins (#21), Dikembe Mutombo (#55), Lou Hudson (#23), and Ted Turner (#17, in a ceremonial tribute for his ownership tenure from 1977 to 2004).
The franchise’s 58-year Atlanta tenure includes exactly one conference finals appearance per decade on average (2015 and 2021 being the two most recent). The franchise has not made an NBA Finals in Atlanta’s history. The 1958 St. Louis Hawks championship remains the anchor of the franchise’s title history.
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Sources
The 1956 Russell trade and the 1958 championship narrative are from the NBA’s 1957-58 season archive and Basketball-Reference. Pete Maravich Atlanta tenure facts are from Basketball-Reference. The 1988 Bird-Wilkins Game 7 details are from contemporaneous Sports Illustrated coverage and the NBA’s archived playoff records. The Wilkins-for-Manning trade timing is from Atlanta Journal-Constitution February 1994 coverage. The Atlanta Spirit Group purchase details are from the 2004 Time Warner sale announcement. The Joe Johnson sign-and-trade is from NBA.com’s 2005-06 transaction log. The 2018 draft-night Luka-Trae swap is from the NBA Draft broadcast and the league’s transaction record. The January 2026 Trae trade to Washington is from Athletic deadline-week reporting and the league’s transaction record.
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