Jamal Crawford is finding a home

And before that, Crawford was raised by two parents in two homes, separated by a bunch of west coast. There was the Seattle he loved and the Los Angeles he resented, and no simple way to reconcile the two.

All of which leads the outside observer to cast Crawford’s story as a guy coming to Atlanta seeking a place to lay down the burden of impermanence.

Can this specialist in the art of propelling a 9.39-inch ball through an 18-inch hoop settle in and stay a spell? Can a man who collects community service awards the way an LP record collects dust become a seated part of a community? (And if a playoff game or two could be thrown in as well, that would be swell).

In other words, can Crawford find a basketball home in Atlanta?

“Yeah, that’s a good theme,” he agreed, always happy to help a writer in need.

So, run with it.

Crawford hates losing

In Atlanta, where he was traded for a couple of spare parts, Crawford trusts that a disturbing statistical distinction will come to an end. He is the NBA’s active leader in games played (599 entering the weekend) without a postseason appearance — and he is sixth on the all-time list.

“That really bugs him,” said Crawford’s old coach at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High, Mike Bethea. “I’ve never seen a guy who hates losing more than him.”

He has been with a rebuilding Chicago, a shipwrecked New York and, briefly, with an enigmatic Golden State, wherever that is. Those teams combined won less than 30 percent of the time when Crawford was with them. With all those dogs, he was going to win the Iditarod before he was going to make it to the NBA playoffs.

While the Hawks aren’t a certainty, Crawford really likes his chances to finally see the other side of the season.

“I’d hate to say I’m 100 percent sure [of making the playoffs],” he said. “But, if we do what we’re supposed to do and avoid major injuries, I’m 99.9 percent sure.”

To Atlanta, he brings a powerful sense of involvement. Behind his own charitable foundation, Crawford already has a legacy of giving.

His old high school gym was worn out — “I referred to it as the Rainier Skating Rink. Players were slipping and sliding all over the place,” Bethea said. With Crawford’s $100,000 makeover, the players had all the traction that money could buy.

When visiting a Bronx school, he noted the library was a mess. The Jamal Crawford Library at P.S. 58 is back up to date, fully Google ready.

His foundation funded athletic trainers for Seattle area high schools and purchased defibrillators for the gyms.

Being closer to his son

For Crawford personally, Atlanta has one asset nowhere else can match — 11-year-old Eric. His son was living here all the while Crawford was out mining the league for his millions. They’d spend the bulk of their time together in the offseason, back in Seattle, with occasional visits in-season during school breaks. The current arrangement is a lot more constant and satisfying, he said.

“We can go to movies, do fun things that we wouldn’t be able to do if I wasn’t in Atlanta. We saw each other during training camp — that was very exciting for both of us. It’s a different dynamic than we’ve ever had,” Crawford said.

He is well versed on the subject of a split household. Crawford was raised mostly by his mother in Seattle. When he was 14, and in need of some male guidance, his mother believed, he was bundled off to dad in L.A. There, Crawford didn’t exactly thrive.

His studies continued to slide, so much that he played no school ball while in California. He never got comfortable in his tough surroundings. “He might have worked on his track more in L.A. than his basketball, having to run from situations,” Bethea said.

Every time his mother came south to visit, Crawford asked to go home with her. Finally, at 16, with the help of a sister who bought him the ticket, he flew back to Seattle and stubbornly declared he was there to stay.

Bethea certainly was on board with the move. For two years, the coach had a program-making player, a slick guard who, when the mood was on him, was utterly unstoppable. As Crawford evolved into a local star, he was befriended by a wealthy telecommunications entrepreneur who occasionally helped the kid financially, reportedly providing food, lodging, gifts and the use of a car.

That relationship drew the full attention of the NCAA as Crawford became the centerpiece of a talented 1999 Michigan recruiting class. Controversy raged as interested parties tried to figure out who Berry Henthorn was and what was his interest in Crawford.

“[The NCAA] didn’t know what to call him,” Crawford said. “He wasn’t alumni. He wasn’t an AAU coach. He wasn’t an agent. He wasn’t a Michigan supporter, none of that. He was a good guy.”

The NCAA determined the support was improper, violating the concept of amateurism, and suspended Crawford in February 2000. He had played but 17 games at Michigan and was the Wolverines’ leading scorer at the time.

He found a soft place to land in the 2000 NBA draft, taken eighth overall.

The joy of the game

If Crawford has been scarred by any of his basketball experiences, he doesn’t show it.

At each stop, Atlanta included, he has been the most open and approachable of players. He has kept cynicism at bay, he said, by “always trying to remember why I started playing the game, the joy I had playing.”

“It’s not easy, but it is easier for me to adapt because I always feel like I’m having fun playing, no matter where I’m at.”

With his role drastically changed in Atlanta, he’ll call frequently on that willingness to adapt.

The man keeps marvelous company, having joined Wilt Chamberlain, Moses Malone and Bernard King as the only players to have scored 50 or more points in a game with three teams. And Crawford says confidently that scoring 50 “will happen again, for sure.”

But how so in Atlanta? A starter for the bulk of his career, he is coming off the bench now. He is playing for a coach, Mike Woodson, who is known to wring his starters dry of minutes.

Plus, Crawford is on a mission to prove himself as something more than a scorer, to show that he can facilitate and play defense as well.

Crawford has been so deferential that the Hawks’ Joe Johnson was moved to say, “He has been very unselfish, even, I think, too unselfish at times.”

“I know my reputation around the NBA is as a scorer,” Crawford said. “In high school, I was a point guard — that’s how I think of myself. I feel like I’m a scoring point guard. But once you score a certain number of points it’s, ‘Oh, you’re a scorer.’ They like to put you in that box.

“That was my conscious effort when I got here to make sure the guys understood that, yeah, I’ll score, but I like to set other guys up. That first week [of training camp], I may have taken like three shots the whole week.”

In the Hawks opener Wednesday, he took as many shots (three) as he had assists. He scored only three points. His reward for trying to play defense: Four quick fouls.

“I haven’t played that little since my rookie year, I think,” he said after a 13:36 work night.

Then came Friday, against the Wizards, and a glimpse at the flip side of a new Hawk. Crawford went for 15 in the first half, 16 for the game.

All it takes to settle into a new home is a little time.