Five straight on the road. The last time that happened, I was in 8th grade, had braces, and still thought there was an off-chance I might play professional basketball someday.

After last night's 106-105 win over Golden State (sweeping the season series with the Warriors), Atlanta has now won it's last five road games, and is 3-3 in the month of February, with all three wins coming away from Philips. What gives? I have no idea. Are the home rims too tight or something? Maybe the team needs to start staying at the Omni before home games to simulate the road atmosphere, I don't know, but it is quite a riddle.

Anyway, the Hawks have started 2-0 on this west coast trip, which I think was pretty much a pipe dream when we left for Phoenix. The reason we are doing so well? It's a team effort of course, but we have to single out Josh Smith for his efforts of late. 20+ points in five of his last six. Double-doubles in seven of eleven.

We have talked about this before (and Sekou Smith mentioned it in his blog post today as well), but if Josh can become the consistent #2 option behind Joe Johnson, then this team becomes much more formidable. For the season now, the Hawks are 11-7 when J-Smoove gets a double-double.

Things seem to be looking up, I gotta say. I was thinking about this on the way into the office this morning - follow me if you can.

Let's pretend the last two seasons didn't happen. Actually, forget that. Let's pretend the last decade didn't exist except for last year, and the Hawks were, say, the Bobcats, a recent expansion team. Wouldn't you be incredibly excited about this team? You are talking about a squad that is the youngest in the NBA, so every single player's best days are presumably ahead of him, they have a ton of salary-cap room, and most of the players are locked into playing for the franchise for the foreseeable future. Wouldn't you be getting very excited about the team's prospects for the next few years?

We aren't there yet (duh), and even wins like last night's in Golden State show how we still haven't learned how to close out games all the time (note: take the ball to the hole - good things happen), but I think there is reason to believe there are sunnier skies on the horizon, certainly for future seasons, and maybe even for this one.