Welcome to the seventh installment of 30 Teams, 30 Years, 
30 Drafts featuring the Atlanta Hawks. This series takes you through each of the teams’ draft picks from 1978-2008 and evaluates how they fared. The Hawks are a team you don’t think about much when it comes to big name draft picks and apparently that is for good reason. They scored by far the lowest out of any of our draft grades so far.
Total Score: 1.258
View the previous teams and their scores here:
Boston Celtics – 3.885
Philadelphia 76ers – 2.561
Toronto Raptors – 2.659
Orlando Magic – 2.861
Charlotte Bobcats – 2.225
New York Knicks – 2.471
New Jersey Nets – 2.49
Let us know in the comments below who you think their best and worst draft picks were.
To see how the score was calculated, check out the intro post here.
[table id=106 /]
1- Lee was the first Puerto Rican born player to play in the NBA
2- Nothing really of note about Al Wood. I just felt like pointing out that it took the Hawks 4 years and 8 draft picks just to break into the positive point column…Ouch!
3- Ouch, and we are back into negatives. The Hawks also get another negative two for this pick due to drafting Keith over “Fat” Lever. You may have expected to see Nique in this draft, but remember; Nique was drafted by the Jazz and not traded until September. For the purposes of this series we are going by the team a player was on at the end of draft night.
4- If you are reading this I assume you know that his son Austin was drafted by the Bobcats this past June. But did you know Austin is in fact a third generation NBA player. Doc’s uncle was Jim Brewer, who was a member of the controversial 72 Olympic team and had a 9 year career himself, mostly with the Cavs.
5- Willis is one of only 15 players with over 16,000 points and 11,000 rebounds. He is also the oldest player to have played more than one game in a season.
6- Jon Koncak was drafted ahead of Chris Mullin, but Mullin and Nique shared a position so I could not take away for this. In 1989 Koncak signed a contract that paid him more than Jordan, Bird and Magic, prevented the Hawks from pursuing other free agents and earned himself the nickname “Jon Contract”, which totally sounds like it came out of the social media age. Basically he was the Joe Johnson of his day, only if Joe Johnson came of the bench a majority of his career.
7- Sadly Lorenzo passed in 2011 while crashing an empty bus he was driving for Elite Coach. He is interred in Historic Oakwood Cemetery in the same section as Jim Valvano, so the two are forever linked in death as they were in life. RIP Lorenzo.
8- You may recognize the name Haywoode Workman for another reason, he is currently an active NBA ref.
9- In 2011 Rumeal was sentenced to 78 months in jail for fraud charges involving his business dealings. He was also accused of swindling his mother out of her own home as well. Stay classy, Rumeal.
10- Like when the Knicks drafted a criminal and an assistant principal with back to back picks, the Hawks pulled a similar feat in drafting a criminal and then a future LAPD officer in Trevor Wilson.
11- All you need to know about Doug Edwards NBA career is that he acquired the nickname “Doughboy”. Both for his soft on court play, and his infatuation with Tim Horton’s doughnut chain.
12- If you are keeping score at home Priest is the fifth player the Hawks have received a penalty for being a first round pick who failed to reach 100 NBA games. By far the most to this point.
13- Gonna guess that Josh appears in 23 more games. He will have those two points subtracted though for being drafted before Iggy/Deng.
14- This is a historically bad pick. The Hawks were in desperate need of a point guard and opted on picking UNC’s 6th man over CP3 and D-Will. Just awful and worth -4 points for them.
15- Al has already appeared in two all star games in his young career. It is not farfetched to see him appearing in one more.
16- Acie Law is the great nephew of Ernie Banks. It also isn’t too much to think that Acie will get 12 more appearances in the NBA.
