As the San Antonio Spurs dominated the Miami Heat in last year’s NBA Finals, much of the narrative naturally focused on LeBron James and the sudden collapse of the South Beach Empire.

But largely forgotten in that midsummer night’s thrashing was the manner in which the Spurs made quick work of the Heat in five games. With lightning-fast, impossibly precise ball movement complemented by an arsenal of three-point shooters lurking on the wings, the Spurs’ offense resembled poetry as much as it did basketball.

As Miami’s Big Three went down in what would be their final game, capping off a bizarre four years that will surely provide fodder for countless ESPN documentaries in 20 years, we saw a new phenomenon take their place. After years of smash-mouth basketball with Tim Duncan and David Robinson in the post, the Spurs reinvented themselves with heavy influence from the international game — a uniquely synergistic team brand of basketball that seemed sure to take the Association by storm back in June.

Now, at the end of January, I think it’s safe to say that that storm has arrived, but it has made its landing in the most unlikeliest of places: at the home of basketball purgatory itself.

I consider myself lucky that I fell in love with basketball long before I became a supporter of the Atlanta Hawks. I don’t think anything can kill one’s basketball joie de vivre quite like watching your team duke it out for the eighth seed in the East year after year with Josh Smith jacking up threes left and right, and all hopes of getting lucky in the lottery crushed by receiving the 15th pick in the draft.

On top of being a textbook definition of mediocrity since the turn of the century, the Hawks have had to fight a battle almost no other NBA team seriously faces: winning the hearts of their own fans and overcoming a tenuous (at best) relationship with the city of Atlanta. And whatever good will the franchise seemed to build towards being embraced by their fan base quickly soured when the team traded away their one recognizable super star in Joe Johnson and faced a Donald Sterling Lite moment when racist emails from former owner Bruce Levenson surfaced in the press.

Despite being a large market thirsting for a major super star, Atlanta has become a no fly zone for high-profile free agents, possibly even placing the franchise’s future in jeopardy.

Yet here we find ourselves more than halfway through the regular season, and those same Atlanta Hawks are leading the Eastern Conference by five games. On top of that, they’ve absolutely owned the big bad boys from the other coast, going 10-2 against the Western Conference.

Many have speculated and scrutinized Atlanta’s surge to the top and many more (including myself to a certain degree) are skeptical that they’ll finish the season first in the standings, but you can’t argue with the results thus far. With the exception of Golden State, no one is playing better basketball than the Hawks right now and it all starts with two points that I laid out earlier: the absence of a superstar and a new brand of Spurs-esque basketball.

Watching the Hawks play, you can feel the cohesiveness of the team jumping out of the screen; they definitely have that ’04 Pistons vibe about them: no truly otherworldly, transcendent player, but several talented, fine-tuned pieces that play hard on both ends of the floor.

And the chief architect behind that system is head coach Mike Budenholzer, a former Spurs assistant who has taken the concepts in San Antonio to another level. With warp-speed ball movement and constant motion, the Hawks’ offense is nonstop engine, pumping openings for the team’s legion of three-point assassins, led by Kyle Korver, who is playing the best basketball of his life at age 33 and shooting over 50 percent from three this season. Throw in a high-caliber point guard in Jeff Teague and one of the most underrated players in the NBA in Al Horford, and you start to understand how this team has grabbed the league by the horns.

I don’t mean to write this piece simply to unconditionally praise or pay tribute to the Hawks. Yes, I’m happy to see them play well and I’ll be rooting for them to bring home a championship, but I think the real story here is how Atlanta has bucked all conventional wisdom to rise to the top despite the absence of a true super star.

Basketball is a constant laboratory as new ideas and innovations take hold in the sport and produce things we’ve never seen before. Like any other extremely competitive enterprise, others will catch on; it wouldn’t surprise me if in the near future, more teams started employing this wide-open, international style of attack.

In a constant battle for relevance and the support of their fans, the latest chapter of the Hawks saga is the most interesting yet. They stand as the product of a series of major evolutions: of their team, of their city, of their style of play and of the NBA as a whole. Let’s see how along they can keep this thing going.

Vihan Lakshman can’t help but get excited about basketball innovation. Let him know how your team is changing the game at vihan ‘at’ stanford.edu — his editor’s Knicks certainly are.