Atlanta Hawks

Atlanta had never had a major professional basketball team before 1968, when the franchise arrived from St. Louis and took the name of the city's minor-league baseball team, the Crackers, whose Hawks nickname it borrowed outright. Before Atlanta, before St. Louis, the club had already worn two other names and lived in two other cities, tracing back to 1946 as the Buffalo Bisons, then the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, then the Milwaukee Hawks. That restlessness ended once the team settled in Georgia, and it is the Atlanta name that has stuck for the decades since.

The one NBA championship on the club's record dates from 1958, won in St. Louis under Bob Pettit, who led the team past the Boston Celtics 4–2 in the finals. It remains the only title the franchise has to show for four trips to the finals, all of them made before the move south. Atlanta itself has not added another.

Since then the identity of the team has been carried by individual scorers rather than by team success: Dominique Wilkins, whose dunking earned him the nickname "the Human Highlight Film," became the player most associated with the Atlanta era, while Pete Maravich and Dikembe Mutombo passed through in different decades and left their own marks. The current roster is built around Trae Young, whose scoring and passing have made him the face of the team at State Farm Arena.

No rivalry runs deeper than the one with the Celtics, forged in those four finals meetings of the late 1950s and early 1960s and kept alive since in playoff series long after the championship itself slipped into history. Boston, more than any other opponent, is the name Atlanta measures itself against.