Buffalo Bisons (NBL)
| Atlanta Hawks | ||||
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| Conference | Eastern | |||
| Division | Southeast | |||
| Founded | 1946 | |||
| History |
Buffalo Bisons 1946 Tri-Cities Blackhawks 1946–1951 Milwaukee Hawks 1951–1955 St. Louis Hawks 1955–1968 Atlanta Hawks 1968–present |
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| Arena | Philips Arena | |||
| Location | Atlanta, Georgia | |||
| Team colors | Torch Red, Volt Green, Georgia Granite Gray, White |
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| President | Mike Budenholzer | |||
| Team manager | Wes Wilcox | |||
| Head coach | Mike Budenholzer | |||
| Ownership | Tony Ressler | |||
| Affiliation(s) | Erie BayHawks (beginning 2017–18) | |||
| Championships | 1 | |||
| Conference titles |
4 Western: 4 (1957, 1958, 1960, 1961) Eastern: 0 |
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| Division titles | 5 (1970, 1980, 1987, 1994, 2015) | |||
| Retired numbers | 5 (9, 21, 23, 44, 55) | |||
| Website | hawks.com | |||
| Uniforms | ||||
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The Atlanta Hawks are a professional basketball team based in Atlanta. The Hawks compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member team of the league's Eastern Conference Southeast Division. The team plays its home games at Philips Arena.
The team's origins can be traced to the establishment of the Buffalo Bisons in 1946 in Buffalo, New York, a member of the National Basketball League (NBL) and owned by Ben Kerner and Leo Ferris. After 38 days in Buffalo, the team moved to Moline, Illinois, where they were renamed the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. In 1949, they joined the NBA as part of the merger between the NBL and the Basketball Association of America (BAA), and had Red Auerbach as coach briefly. In 1951, Kerner moved the team to Milwaukee, where they changed their name to the Hawks. Kerner and the team moved again in 1955 to St. Louis, where they won their only NBA championship in 1958 and qualified to play in the NBA Finals in 1957, 1960 and 1961. The Hawks played the Boston Celtics in all four of their trips to the NBA Finals. The St. Louis Hawks moved to Atlanta in 1968, when Kerner sold the franchise to Thomas Cousins and former Georgia Governor Carl Sanders.
The Hawks currently own the second-longest drought (behind the Sacramento Kings) of not winning an NBA championship at 57 seasons. The franchise's lone NBA championship, as well as all four NBA Finals appearances, occurred when the team was based in St. Louis. Meanwhile, they went 48 years without advancing past the second round of the playoffs in any format, until finally breaking through in 2015. Much of the failure they've experienced in the postseason can be traced back to their poor history in the NBA draft. Since 1980, the Hawks have drafted only four players who have been chosen to play in an NBA All-Star Game (Doc Rivers, Kevin Willis, Al Horford, and Jeff Teague). Dominique Wilkins was actually selected by the Utah Jazz and traded to the Hawks a few months after the draft. Horford and Teague are the only All-Star Hawks to have been drafted since Willis was selected in 1984, and Horford is also the only first-rounder the Hawks selected in their nine-year playoff drought to play in an NBA All-Star Game.
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Wikipedia