Atlanta Hawks

Lore & Background

The roots of the Pacers-Hawks animosity can be traced to the 1976 merger, when the ABA's Indiana franchise entered the NBA and immediately found itself in the same conference as Atlanta, a team that had just settled into Georgia after leaving St. Louis. For the next fifteen years, the two clubs drifted through the middle of the East, meeting twice a season in games that rarely made national headlines but always produced scrappy, foul-heavy basketball that local fans savored. The rivalry ignited in the early 1990s. Atlanta's roster—Wilkins, Blaylock, Spud Webb, Rumeal Robinson—was fast, physical, and built to bully smaller guards off the ball. Indiana's identity revolved around Reggie Miller, a 6-foot-3 sniper who thrived in the chaos the Hawks created. The contrast was the story: Wilkins attacking the rim with two hands, Miller draining threes from the corner. Blaylock's crossovers and Miller's fadeaways became a recurring narrative on ESPN's pregame shows. The games were physical, the refs whistled a lot, and the crowd noise in both arenas reached a fever pitch in the fourth quarter. By the late 1990s and into the 2000s, the competitive balance shifted. Indiana's 2000s run with Miller, Jermaine O'Neal, and later David West kept them in playoff contention, while Atlanta's roster churned through the post-Wilkins era. The rivalry softened into a regular-season obligation rather than a genuine grudge, though the memory of those 1990s battles still colors how both fanbases view the matchup. It is a rivalry that peaked at a specific moment and has since become a fond, slightly bitter memory for those who lived it.

In Their Own Story

The Georgia Dome in November, the air thick with humidity even under the roof. A Hawks home game, the crowd a sea of red and white. Wilkins catches a lob at the elbow, rises with that slow, coiled power, and slams it through the rim so hard the stanchion shudders. The crowd roars. On the other end, Miller picks up the ball at the top of the key, draws two defenders, and fires a three from the left wing that swishes with a sound like a pistol crack. The Pacers bench leaps to its feet. The Hawks bench is silent. This is the rhythm of the rivalry: no quarter, no mercy, just two teams who refuse to let the other breathe. Four quarters of elbows, of screens set a half-second too late, of a ref's whistle that satisfies nobody. By the final two minutes, the score is tied, the arena is deafening, and both teams know this game will be remembered long after the stats fade into the season's noise.

Reader's Guide

The rival: Atlanta Hawks. The era it peaked: the 1990s, when both teams were legitimate playoff contenders in the Eastern Conference and every regular-season meeting felt like a mini-series. The war story that defined it: the early-1990s first-round playoff series. The Hawks came in with the higher seed, the faster pace, the bigger name in Wilkins. The Pacers answered with Miller's cold-blooded shooting and a defensive scheme that made Atlanta's guards look slow. It was a series of close games, of technical fouls, of a Hawks fan in the third row screaming at a referee who had just called a charge on Blaylock. The Pacers took it, and Atlanta never quite got over it. Current status: it's a regular-season grudge now. Both teams still meet twice a year in the Eastern Conference, but the competitive stakes have softened. Neither side is a consistent second-round threat in the way they were in '93 or '94. The rivalry lives in the memory of fans who were twenty-five watching Miller and Wilkins and are now forty-five refreshing a standings page in March, wondering if this is the year it matters again. And the bitterness? You sit in your living room, the TV glowing, and you watch them take the second-round series. You watch their point guard hit the game-winner and you want to throw the remote. You tell yourself it's just basketball. You know it's not. You know it's Atlanta, and you know they've always had something to say to you.

Did You Know?

• Reggie Miller, the Pacers' all-time leading scorer, played his entire 18-season career in Indiana, making him the constant in a rivalry where Atlanta's roster turned over far more frequently.
• Dominique Wilkins, the Hawks' most iconic player, was a multiple-time All-Star and one of the most dominant scorers of the 1980s and early 1990s before his tenure in Atlanta ended in the late 1980s.
• The Pacers entered the NBA as part of the 1976 ABA-NBA merger, meaning their first season as an NBA club was 1976-77, a few years after the Hawks had already settled into Georgia.