Atlanta Is Where Opponents Forget How to Miss
The city has long been under a kind of sports curse, but now it’s getting weird — even by Atlanta standards.
Back in the summer of 2021, my FiveThirtyEight colleague Santul Nerkar and I wrote about how Atlanta was — statistically speaking — the most cursed major pro sports city of the previous four decades. From 1980 up to then, the city had fallen short by 4.75 total championships across the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB,1 beating out Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, San Diego and Charlotte among the metros who underachieved the most versus what we’d expect if every team in a league had an equal chance of winning each season.
Flash forward by four months, and you might think Atlanta finally shed that label — along with its associated curse — when the Braves beat the Houston Astros to win the World Series, overcoming the loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to win despite spending a record amount of time below .500 for a champion. Sure, nothing could atone for the blown 28-3 lead of Super Bowl LI, but for once, Atlanta fans did get to celebrate instead of suffer.
Don’t worry, though: traces of the old curse still crop up in Atlanta from time to time.
Take, for instance, the 2024 Falcons. In the middle of last season, I noted that Atlanta was tracking for the worst kicking campaign in recent NFL history between its own misses — most courtesy of Younghoe Koo — and, even more vexing, the fact that it was allowing the league’s co-highest field goal percentage on the other side of the ball.
Tracking how many points each team’s kickers added relative to average on field goals (accounting for kick distances) and extra points, and doing the same for opponents, I found that the Falcons were losing about 2 net points per contest from the kicking game alone in 2024, and had been twice as bad as any other team in the NFL in that regard across the 2023 and ‘24 seasons combined.
The Falcons did improve some in the second half of the season, finishing as “only” the fourth-worst team in recent history by net kicking points above average:
Still, they ended up allowing the league’s highest opponent field goal percentage (96.9 percent) by far, and ranked dead last in opponent kicking points added per game (+0.78), tied for the 17th-highest in a single season since 1991.
Around the time Atlanta’s football team was tracking at midseason for the worst kicking season in at least 33 years, the city’s basketball team was tipping off a new season of its own — and, amazingly, inherited a version of the same curse.
As of the All-Star break, the Hawks are currently allowing the NBA’s highest opponent free throw percentage (80.6 percent) and — you guessed it — the league’s worst rate of points above average per game from the charity stripe, with opponents tacking on 0.6 more PPG from free throws than we’d expect from an average team in the same number of attempts.
While not quite as historic as the Falcons were, the Hawks’ number is still tracking among the 40 worst seasons since the 1976 ABA merger in terms of opponent PPG added at the free throw line in a single year:
It’s one thing for an NFL team to have bad kicking luck. It’s another for a franchise to endure it over multiple seasons. And then for an entire city to experience the same exact phenomenon on the hardwood, too? That’s just cruel.
So what can be done to fix any of this?
Most of opposing kicking is admittedly just luck, so the odds are that the Falcons’ struggles at “defending” kickers will straighten out with enough of a sample size. (This seems to be what Atlanta’s brass is thinking, as they decided to bring back Special Teams Coordinator Marquice Williams for another season — despite his overseeing the team’s horrendous net kicking game over multiple years.)
But beyond tactics, perhaps Mercedes-Benz Stadium could stand to be less friendly to kickers.
We know that closed stadiums are beneficial to kick in; road kickers at domes last season made 87.3 percent of their FG tries, compared with 81.4 percent outdoors. And even by that standard, the Falcons’ opponents particularly benefited from playing in Atlanta: In total, they went a combined 21-for-21 on FGs at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, tying it with Houston’s NRG Stadium as the only regular NFL home venue where opponents didn’t miss last year. Since it opened in 2017, no regular stadium has seen opposing kickers make a higher share of field goals (92.1 percent) than at Mercedes-Benz.2
In the NBA, opponent FT shooting is a bit more interesting. The Hawks are only allowing 21.0 free throw attempts per 100 possessions, which is tied for 20th-highest in the league, so they’re not fouling the hell out of the opposition. (Given the team’s mediocre history defensively,3 they might even stand to be more hard-nosed and aggressive at that end of the court, fouls be damned.) But opponents are making the most of those trips, without question.
One thing NBA coaches have going for them on opposing free throws that NFL coaches don’t on opponent field goals is the question of who is being fouled. So are the Hawks just fouling better FT shooters? We can easily look at who has attempted the most free throws against Atlanta, and how their FT% compares with league average according to Basketball-Reference’s adjusted shooting index:
Overall, the group of shooters the Hawks have fouled this season — with a cumulative FT% index of 100 — have basically been exactly league-average from the stripe during the season overall. They have just been shooting much better then their usual norm specifically against Atlanta: their FT% is 3.2 percent better than league average in games against the Hawks. (This means they actually are a below-average FT% group against all other teams, since the overall season number includes games against both Atlanta and everyone else.)
Just like with the Falcons and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, though, there may be something to the idea of teams finding it easier to shoot in Atlanta. This season, the Hawks’ opponents are making 81.6 percent of their FTs in Atlanta, versus 79.9 percent in Hawk road games. State Farm Arena has seen the second-highest road FT% of any NBA venue this season, trailing only the Footprint Center in Phoenix (81.9 percent). That’s nothing new; over the past five seasons, road teams have made 79.3 percent of FTs at State Farm Arena, which ranks third among regular arenas behind only the Golden 1 Center (79.5) and Amalie Arena (79.4).
Traditionally, Atlanta was always one of the tougher places to lock in and play well, because… reasons. 😉 But when it comes to making kicks and shots that the opponent is largely powerless to affect, visitors also seem to be having a great time during the games in recent years. Who knows? Maybe some bizarre cosmic force has deemed that every Atlanta team must suffer an unfair fate in at least one statistical category per season.
Until Mercedes-Benz Stadium manipulates the air around opposing kicks, or the Hawks start pumping in fake crowd noise when opponents are at the line, it’s tough to say what Atlanta can do to end this particular curse. (Perhaps a Ted Lasso-style exorcism ceremony is in order?) But if this keeps up, maybe Braves pitchers should start bracing themselves to give up a historically high BABIP this summer — just to complete the trilogy.
Filed under: NBA, NFL, Voodoo and witchcraft
Sorry, MLS fans — and yes, we got your feedback about the 2018 Atlanta United’s championship. But the MLS probably needs to rank better than the ninth-strongest soccer league in the world to join those other leagues, which are all the world’s strongest in their respective sports.
Only three venues are at or above 90 percent over that span: Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta (92.1 percent); EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville (91.5); and Nissan Stadium in Nashville (90.9).
They rank 15th-best this year, which is actually a vast improvement over any of their previous seven seasons (when they were no better than 21st).
Flash forward by four months
I think you mean four years