When the NBA Finals tip off Wednesday, there will almost certainly be a who’s who of long-suffering fans in attendance who have waited an agonizing 27 years to see the New York Knicks back on basketball’s biggest stage.
One of them will even be in the broadcast booth.
ESPN’s Mike Breen will be the play-by-play man for his record-extending 21st straight NBA Finals this year. And for the first time, the New York native will be calling the team he grew up rooting for in the championship round.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say there are emotions,” Breen acknowledged to NBC News this week.
In addition to his work for ESPN, Breen has called Knicks games locally for over 30 years. He began as the team’s radio announcer in 1991, and after a brief stint as the lead play-by-play man later that decade, he took over the position for good in 2004.
“It’s not just that I was a Knick fan since I was a kid, but I’ve been broadcasting Knick games for over half my life,” Breen said. “So, you know, when you see a team have a chance to do something they haven’t done forever, there’s certainly emotions there.”
But Breen is also well aware of the professional responsibility he has to the viewers at home and the team of people who produce the Finals broadcast. Breen has already called several Knicks games during the postseason, including their dominant sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals.
While the morass of social media will always make it difficult to judge which announcers are actually liked or disliked, within the NBA community, it’s hard to find anyone with something negative to say about Breen despite his ties to the Knicks.
“Quite frankly, I learned from the best,” Breen said. “Marv Albert was the voice of the Knicks, and he did a lot of big Knick games against the Bulls and against the Heat and against the Pacers, and by watching him and seeing how he handled it, that’s what influenced me, and that’s how I learned.”
Albert, 84, was New York’s lead play-by-play man from 1967 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2004. From 1990 to 2021, he was also the lead play-by-play voice for the NBA on NBC and the NBA on TNT.
He was flattered to hear Breen still reveres him.
“I appreciate it, but he would have made it no matter what,” Albert told NBC News. “With Mike, his play-by-play is superb, off the charts. Always has great rapport with his broadcast partners. He could actually ref a game in that he knows the rules so thoroughly.”
Albert first met Breen when they were both working for the radio station WNBC in the 1980s. Albert describes Breen as curious, someone who knew he always wanted to be a sportscaster. A young Breen would pepper Albert with questions, and as they grew closer, Albert said, Breen would sometimes sit in on a Knicks broadcast at Madison Square Garden, listening to the call with headphones on years before he got to do the job himself.
“I’ve known him since he was basically a kid, his early days working, doing some activities in the newsroom at NBC,” Albert said. “He’s a terrific guy, and everybody loves him.”
In addition to calling the game down the middle, another way Breen has tried to emulate Albert is by being selective with his catchphrase, the famous “Bang!” which he can be heard dropping after some of the biggest shots in NBA history. Think Ray Allen’s 3-pointer in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals or Kyrie Irving’s in Game 7 of the 2016 Finals epic.
“I get a kick out of ‘Bang!’” said Albert, who welcomes the comparisons to his iconic “Yes!”
The flip side of “Bang!” is Breen’s infamous “Way off!” when a player misses a big shot. Breen’s friends and family have shown him the memes of how devastating the call can be, but he says he has never considered holding back on it.
“I’d be pulling punches all game,” Breen said with a chuckle. “It’d be way too much thinking if I started with those thoughts in my head during the course of a call.”
As he and the Knicks wait for the Finals to start, Breen said the most enjoyable part about this season was watching the team grow from training camp to now. He added that New York is playing “beautiful team basketball” at the highest level, which he believes any fan should be able to appreciate.
While Breen has called other sports throughout his career, he said basketball was always his favorite growing up. (He’s impressed with the broadcasters who have time to call multiple sports, referring to NBC Sports’ Mike Tirico as “an absolute machine.”) The young Knicks fan now has a voice that’s synonymous with his childhood team and the NBA itself, as Breen has called more than a quarter of every NBA Finals ever played.
It also means he’s in a unique position to understand how special this series will be for New Yorkers.
“When it’s a situation that a team has gone through, such a long drought without a title, and not just a drought of a title, but many years of bad basketball and irrelevance outside of New York, that’s the beauty of being a fan,” Breen said. “If you’re a passionate fan of the team, you’re gonna have misery, you’re gonna be so disappointed on a lot of occasions. But it’s all worth it when it all finally comes to fruition.”
“It’s the coolest thing about sports, the factor of caring so much for a sports team that it affects your mood and affects the way you feel. It’s the beauty of sports, and you get rewarded with years like this if you’re a Knick fan.”
