Hoops Analyst

We now turn to one of the “new fangled” divisions, the Southeast, which was created to accommodate the expansion Charlotte Bobcats and even out the divisions (in case you missed it, an explanation of our “best” inquiry can be found here).  Aside from Charlotte, the division contains two old franchises (Atlanta and Washington) and two newer guys (Miami and Orlando).  The division lacks the obvious compelling best in franchise debates that we see in many of the other divisions but there may be some hidden teams or facts we never considered, so let’s check it out: 

Atlanta Hawks: 

-Kyle’s Best Team:  1986-87 (57-25)

-Most Wins:  1986-87 and 1993-94 (56-26)

-Best Playoff Run:  1958-59 (8-3)

Continuing with our divisional tour of best teams by franchise, we come to the Central Division, where we have some tough choices to consider.  If you’re interested in the parameters of our discussion and our standard of review, you can check out the intro here.  But going forward, we get to look a pretty fun bunch of franchises, all of whom had several different years of success to measure against each other…

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Sure, we have the Olympics to keep us quasi-interested in basketball this summer but usually we like to get a bit historical in the summers.  In particular, we like to play with the usual unanswerable (and sometimes irrelevant) questions that we all think about.  This summer we’ll tackle the question of which team is the best in each franchise’s history.  This question is complicated on several levels.  First, you have to define “best.”  Obviously, winning a title may seem like a pre-requisite if you are defining “best” by the team that accomplished the most in a single season.  Playoff success is something to consider but, for better or for worse, we are defining best by guessing who would win in a head-to-head match up most often.  This leads to the next question of whether the level of play has improved over time and how that fact should be incorporated into any assessment.  Our standard answer on this point is that the level of play jumped up in the 1960s and has steadily risen since then.  So, we are skewed more towards modern teams in this inquiry but certainly there are exceptions to this rule. 

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