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The Atlanta Hawks are a professional basketball team based in Atlanta, Georgia. The Hawks compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member team of the league's Eastern Conference Southeast Division. The Hawks play their home games at Philips Arena.
The team's origins can be traced to the establishment of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks in 1946, a member of the National Basketball League and owned by Ben Kerner & Leo Ferris. In 1949, they joined the National Basketball Association (NBA) as part of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America merger, and had Red Auerbach as coach briefly. In 1951, Kerner moved the team moved 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 made the NBA Finals in 1957 and 1960. The Hawks played the Boston Celtics in all three 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 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.