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Joe Johnson is just taking care of his family, I'm sure of it. He is doing the best thing for his loved ones, trying to give them the security he never knew, and pay them back for all their sacrifices while he pursued his dream to be a 'baller.

On the other hand, he is going from the Phoenix Suns to the Atlanta Hawks, which means:

Joe Johnson isn't masking his intentions: He says Atlanta's the place to be.

a) His family needs a lot of care.

b) His family is roughly the population of Bermuda.

c) His family had to submit to actual human sacrifices for the benefit of Johnson's career.

Otherwise, Joe Johnson is stark staring nuts.

Now we understand that athletics is a fleeting career, and if you can set yourself up for eternity, nobody can sensibly fault you. We also understand that everybody's money spends the same. And we definitely know the Hawks and Suns both play in the best basketball league on the planet.

We get all that.

What we don't get, on the other hand, is this:

They're the Atlanta Hawks, for God's sake! Nobody knows them! Nobody watches them! Nobody cares about them! They are the NBA's irreversible coma! Who in their right mind would volunteer for this?

We get the money, we really do. Money is good for a lot of things, and you can actually buy respect with money. In most places.

Atlanta, though, is one of those places where that equation doesn't work. The Hawks can't pay enough money to get a player respect, because they are the Hawks, and because they are the Hawks, a player can't get enough respect to justify the anonymity. Why, if it weren't for the yellow uniforms, nobody would ever know they were there at all.

And that, children, is why whatever Joe Johnson's motivations might be, he ends up being wrong anyway, simply because of his destination.

There are few places where one can say the money isn't worth it under any circumstances. You can justify $70 million in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Denver, Utah, Minnesota, Memphis, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Orlando, Miami, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Toronto and Washington.

You need more for Charlotte and Golden State, say $80 million, because the Hornets are new and the Warriors have been so irrelevant for so long. New Orleans, $90 million, because the owners are such incurable whack jobs.

But Atlanta? Horrible. From Phoenix? Inexcusable. Hell, $70 million is chump change, for the simple reason that you are going from a team on the come to a team players have been willing to sharpen a spoon and tunnel through cement to escape.

It may be that the Hawks have a master plan to get back into the Eastern Conference mix (or the Eastern Conference, period, as far as that goes). They are young, they have a couple of intriguing members (Josh Smith, and uh, er, umm), and nobody can stay horrible forever, right?

Well, wrong. The Warriors are into their second decade of playoff-free basketball. The Clippers were a running punch line until this year. The Wizards just tunneled out of their own private hell.

The point here is that whatever the Hawks have in mind, their recent plans have been abject failures. The team is utterly repellent, and any time they get a player of any stature, they either trade him immediately (Rasheed Wallace) or trade him almost immediately (Antoine Walker).

Then again, maybe that is what Johnson is thinking -- get the money now, and then work on getting back to a good situation. Only that's not foolproof either, because there aren't that many good situations.

In short, this is a plea for sanity, for not taking the huge money from a bad team when the alternative is big money from a good one. This is a gentle reminder that the NBA is the most stratified of leagues, that teams do not move giddily up and down as they do in football, baseball or hockey. In the last 25 years, the championship trophy has seen only seven cities. Half the current membership has never won, and the Hawks haven't even gotten to a conference final since 1969.

It's too late, apparently, for Joe Johnson, of course. He made up his mind, and will be wealthier for having done so. But he will also be utterly forgotten, playing in a town that finds the pro game utterly resistible for a team that keeps watching other people have all the fun.

He will be a rich, impactless man. If that's his idea of a good time, fine. But we're going to play the percentages and guess that he will soon lament his choice, even on the first and 15th of the month. There are still a few things money can't buy, amazingly enough, and relevance is one of them.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com