Hawks trading in Disney-esque fantasy

Last week, the Hawks brought in experts from Disney to tutor Philips Arena workers on keeping the customers happy and catering to all their wholesome fantasies.

Talk about perfect synergy. For aren’t these Hawks today trading in exactly the kind of reality-bending entertainment that made Disney an empire of illusion?

On one side you have the Hawks, leading their conference by four games, winners of eight straight and 22 of their last 24. And on the other you have a talking mouse, a flying elephant and an animatronic Lincoln. Yeah, those are all pretty much parallel experiences.

Sunday was another monorail departure from the norm at Hawks World, the happiest place in Atlanta. On an afternoon when they might have stayed home watching NFL playoff football, an announced sell-out crowd watched the Hawks deconstruct their closest competition in the East, the Wizards of Washington, by 31 points.

Twenty seconds into the game, Jeff Teague came up with the first of the Hawks 14 steals and went court-long for a layup. And the Hawks never trailed from that point.

The Hawks hit half of their considerable number of three-point attempts (31) but they made their loudest statement with the thankless work of defense. They hectored Washington into 19 turnovers, while collecting 14 steals (that’s now 40 in their last three games).

“We got to be like pests, be gnats,” the Hawks DeMarre Carroll said. Along with altering the generations-long apathy toward this city’s NBA team, these Hawks are even tampering with the laws of nature, extending the gnat line well north.

Given a stage to once more prove themselves no mere January anomaly, the Hawks responded Sunday with a singular performance. “I don’t think we’ve played a better game,” guard Kyle Korver agreed.

It is a headline now whenever the Hawks have an empty possession. The memories of a team being shanghaied by Josh Smith or Joe Johnson have been fully purged (eight Hawks scored in double figures Sunday). And Philips Arena, once an outlet store for other stars’ merchandise, is almost becoming a difficult place for opponents to tread.

So, it would seem that the new Hawks CEO brought in to invigorate the franchise can take off the rest of the winter, maybe retreat to some tropical beach and watch both the victories and the waves roll over his bare feet.

“Actually, I think my job just got harder because whenever you have success, you have expectations,” Steve Koonin said.

“We have to keep outdoing ourselves,” the CEO said, sounding very much like a coach now rather than a former cable network executive. “We’ve had some early success but we’re nowhere. We have a long way to go to make going to a Hawks game part of the culture of Atlanta.”

The metrics of how this team is connecting with Atlanta as seldom before are turning serious. Sunday was the fourth announced sellout in the last five home games. Attendance is up more than 2,000 a game over this time last year (next to Cleveland, the biggest bump in the league, Koonin said). The local television ratings are up 40 percent, “and trending upward,” the CEO said.

“It’s about relevance,” Koonin said. “They’re talking about us on sports talk radio, but they’re also talking about us on pop radio.”

There have been some inventive promotions to put butts in seats – like inviting in urban hipsters to reach out through a dating web site at a game and meet that very night. But nothing beats the marketing tool of a ridiculous winning streak.

So extraordinary is this Hawks surge that I have found myself wondering if it is possible a professional basketball team could galvanize this city as the Braves did in 1991 when they became so suddenly chic and successful. Koonin has thought of that, even going back and looking up stories of that worst-to-first season to refresh his memory.

Too early to go quite that far. “We are kind of in the May/June of the parallel,” Koonin said, likening where the Hawks are to baseball before the All Star break. “It could be a real opportunity, though.”