Let’s test your knowledge of and/or interest in the Atlanta Hawks.

If the NBA regular season had ended with Sunday night’s game against the Miami Heat:

A) The Hawks would face the Indiana Pacers in the first round of the playoffs.

B) The Hawks would be a legitimate dark horse to win the NBA Eastern Conference.

C) You mean the lockout ended and the regular season has started?

D) Hawks … Hawks … Yeah, name sounds vaguely familiar.

E) The proverbial, “All of the above.”

If you’re not quite sure what to make of the Hawks, don’t feel alone. Even those who analyze every jump-step and spin move of the NBA have a hard time figuring out what to make of the Hawks. They are as hard to read as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Sunday night’s game against the Heat was their 28th of this truncated season. We don’t know any more about the Hawks than we did when they opened the season … or when they ended last season.

We know they can be pretty good, like when they began January by beating a fully healthy Heat team in Miami by eight points, and when they finished January with a 4-1 road trip.

But they can be maddeningly inconsistent. Three days after that win in Miami, they lost to the Heat -- who were missing LeBron James and Dwayne Wade. They followed that January road trip by losing three straight home games. Two of those losses came to Memphis and Phoenix, a pair of mediocre Western Conference teams. The other came against Philadelphia, which has soared past them in the Eastern Conference pecking order.

So the fact that this was written before Sunday night’s game means nothing. The NBA has conditioned us to ignore the regular season. It’s one part playoff positioning, four parts entertainment.

We won’t really know anything about any of the teams until the playoffs begin in May.

Let me call a 20-second timeout here: Thank you for reading. If attendance figures are any measure of interest in the Hawks, you are to be commended. The Hawks rank 23rd out of 30 NBA teams in average home attendance (14,946 per game). Only two teams currently on pace to make the playoffs -- Indiana and Houston -- rank below them.

That Atlanta isn’t a basketball city hardly constitutes breaking news. The Hawks rank in the bottom third in attendance just about every year. But Hawks fans will support their team when they think they have a chance to do something special. “Special,” though, is a relative term. They packed Philips Arena four years ago when their upstart team swept three home playoff games against the then-vaunted Boston Celtics.

Their poor attendance over the years has been attributed to a perceived lack of passion for basketball in Atlanta. Perhaps that’s partially true. But it’s also true that Atlanta fans have grown conditioned to modest expectations. The NBA is all about the playoffs, more so than the NFL or baseball. And when it comes to the postseason, the Hawks are not even on the periphery. In a good year, they are somebody’s second-round victim. Last year it was Chicago; the year before, Orlando; the year before that, Cleveland. They have never made it past the second round of the playoffs since the team relocated from St. Louis.

When it comes to getting fans to buy in, the Hawks have two other things going against. Ownership is either A) incompetent or B) uncommitted to winning a championship.

There’s no true franchise player. Joe Johnson, their lone All-Star representative, is not an elite player.

This year may present their best chance yet to break through that glass ceiling. No team in the Eastern Conference -- not even the Heat nor the Bulls -- appears invincible. Defense and perimeter shooting can carry a team deep into the playoffs. The Hawks rank fifth in the NBA in scoring defense and second in 3-point shooting.

They will get Al Horford back for the playoffs. Jeff Teague has given them the consistently productive play at point guard that recent teams have lacked.

So maybe this will be their year.

-- Guerry Clegg is an independent correspondent. You can write to him at sports@ledger-enquirer.com