The Atlanta Hawks play the Detroit Pistons at home on Monday, one of 12 games on the NBA's robust Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday schedule.
And you know what jumps off the page?
Not the Hawks' 34-8 record, the best in the Eastern Conference by five games and second in the NBA to the Golden State Warriors. Not their 13 consecutive victories. Not even their 27 victories in the last 29 games.
What stands out is the number 58, with a dollar sign next to it.
According to TicketCity.com, an after-market ticket broker, the cheapest ticket available to see the Hawks play the Pistons on Monday afternoon costs $58. That's the highest get-in-the-door price on the ticket seller's website for any of the NBA's 12 arenas that are doing business on Monday.
There was a time, not long ago, when you could buy a whole week's worth of Hawks tickets for $58 -- and still have money left for beer, popcorn and a Slingbox subscription, so you didn't actually have to suffer through watching the game.
So amid the turmoil of an ownership change and the banishment of the general manager who built the best team in the Eastern Conference over the use of racially charged language, there is this basketball truth on the day when the nation honors its iconic Civil Rights leader: The Hawks' success crosses all racial and ethnic barriers. It is the most genuine kind of success that a sports team, at its best, can achieve.
Rewind to an e-mail that majority owner Bruce Levenson sent in August 2012. In this e-mail, Levenson lamented what had been a fact of life for the Hawks for years, if not decades: the crowds were too small, the season-ticket base too thin.
Then, Levenson's e-mail went sideways in a bad way, with a rant about how the in-game and postgame entertainment were too geared toward black fans, and that, and I quote, "The black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base." Levenson went on ... and on ... and on ... asserting that, "Southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority."
Levenson's twisted viewpoints were uncovered as part of an investigation into racist remarks that GM Danny Ferry made about free agent Luol Deng in a June 2014 conference call with members of the ownership group and basketball staff. Levenson agreed under pressure to sell his majority stake in the team, and Ferry was placed on indefinite leave. An agreement was reached earlier this month for 100 percent of the team to be sold. Bidders are lining up.
Could there be a more thorough repudiation of the views expressed by Levenson in that e-mail than the Hawks' brilliant play on the floor and the awakening of the cash registers in the Philips Arena box office? It turned out that it wasn't gospel or rap music chasing the fans away -- not just black or white, mind you, but all of them. It was the uninspiring product.
When I spoke with Dominique Wilkins recently -- the Human Highlight Reel himself -- about the Hawks' early success this season, dunks and highlights could not have been further from his mind. It was the style of basketball the Hawks were playing that had him inspired -- the sharing of the ball, the movement, the sound defensive schemes.
Doc Rivers, another famous old Hawk who now coaches the Los Angeles Clippers, could not have agreed more.
"You can see the city is turned on by this team," he said. "It’s the way they play that the city loves.
It's a lesson to whomever becomes the new owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and to every other owner scratching his head when he reviews his attendance and revenue books. This weird thing called winning basketball, played in a fundamentally sound way with unselfishness ...
It turns out, that sells.
And so on the ideal day to celebrate diversity in all walks of life and to recognize how far we still have to go, the Atlanta Hawks are the hottest ticket in professional basketball.
Go figure.
