If everything goes perfectly for the Atlanta Hawks this coming season, it might just involve a playoff run as well as a top-five pick in the NBA Draft. That sentence would have felt laughable a month ago, but it is not so far-fetched anymore.
For years, Atlanta found itself in the strange middle ground between contention and irrelevance. The high point was the 2021 Eastern Conference Finals appearance, but the years that followed saw the franchise struggle to build on that momentum.
The Trae Young–Dejounte Murray experiment never fully clicked, and the team lacked a clear identity.