BANG! An ode to Mike Breen and the best word in basketball

Mike Breen became an extremely deserving Hall of Famer this past weekend, receiving due respect for a decades-spanning career that has provided the soundtrack for some of the greatest moments in Knicks and NBA history. Jack Huntley gives Breen his due as an all-time great.

Here’s to the most recognisable voice in the modern NBA, the one and only Mike Breen, now a thoroughly deserving member of the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame.

Here’s to the easy way he does one of the hardest jobs in sports. Here’s to holding our hand through the ecstatic ups and crushing downs and forgettable plateaus. Here’s to harvesting unforgettable moments with a single word. Here’s to effortlessly nursing our experience of the thing we love into our skulls. Here’s to the cadence, always in perfect sonic sync with the action, like a breaking wave narrating the pull of a faraway moon. Here’s to the candor, always measured, never mechanical. Here’s to NBA story time with the man who tells it best: his voice everything about the scene that makes the on-court story sing. Simultaneously acting as blanket, crackling fire, glass of warm milk, and when necessary, something much (see: Knicks fandom), much, stronger.

Words like legend and icon are used too much in sports: but Mike Breen wears them both like his longtime co-announcer Walt Frazier wears multi-colored cuts.

What’s your favorite NBA memory? Chances are it came with a killer soundtrack. 

Kobe Bryant over the entire city of Phoenix from his forever-dominion at the right elbow? Ray Allen over Tony Parker while moonwalking out of bounds? Carmelo Anthony over Taj Gibson to tie it in regulation and then over Luol Deng from the same honey-sweet spot in overtime for the win? Steph Curry from his own personal pocket of possibility, his private dimension of space-time, for a well-earned double-bang? Jeremy Lin over Jose Calderon as the nightcap to some fun-for-all-the-NBA-family (L)insanity?

Mike was watching those moments with you. Sprinkling a little aural salt on the scene, drawing out a little extra flavor, like only he and his microphone can.

That’s the headline: for fans of all shapes and sizes, for a few generations of hoops-loving humans, the man that shouts “BANG!” is inseparable from a National Basketball Association that, in many households around the world, is as much a part of the family as the dog. Or the kitchen table. Or that argument that never ends.

We almost certainly take it for granted, having such a masterful medium as Mike deliver us the nightly gladiatorial ballet of live NBA action into our entertainment-addicted brains. The raw physicality of the spectacle should be inherently incommunicable, but to the extent that it can be repackaged and made available via the coldness of a screen, Breen pulls it off as well as any middleman can or ever has. It matters, the quality of the play-by-play commentary, to the totality of the experience.

Compare and contrast a game accompanied by say, I don’t know, Chris Webber’s voice — good luck in all your future endeavors, by the way, Mr. Webber — to that of a game accompanied by Mike Breen’s. It’s like comparing watching a movie from the cosy cocoon of a theatre, in that seat you always choose, a perfect distance from the screen, with approximately seven times the volume of potentially consumable popcorn in your lap, to watching a movie from the aisle seat of a nosediving 747, while being punched in the face by a dictionary. Not that it’s in any way fair to compare a former professional player-turned analyst to a current professional play-by-play savant: but the point is that the respective effects of their respective voices is precisely the wrong kind of incomparable to the end users’ ears.

In a league that idolizes and glorifies individual excellence, at what he does, Mike Breen is as good as it gets. 

Mike Breen is LeBron James with a head of steam. Mike Breen is Steph Curry with his eyes open. Mike Breen is Nikola Jokic downloading a thousand fast-moving angles with the nonchalance of a man taking a Sunday morning deuce. Mike Breen is the tyranny of Kawhi Leonard’s sci-fi hands. Mike Breen is Tom Thibodeau 10 Diet Cokes deep in the bowels of MSG at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday rewinding and watching and pausing and plotting and rewinding and watching film, again, one more time, just in case he missed something microscopically significant. Mike Breen is Zion Williamson one-on-one with Trae Young. Mike Breen is Frank Ntilikina in a photograph.

The most recognizable voice in the NBA’s induction into the Hall of hoops was inevitable, his soothing call long an institution, his instrument of easy genius as much a part of the league as whistles and swishes and the squeak of sneakers: his enshrinement as simple a decision as the sound a squeezed trigger makes is recognizable.

From every BANG!-blessed ear of every fan whose ever been lucky enough to hear the most meaningful, elegant, and emphatic four letters in the game — thank you, Mike Breen, for being you, and being the best at what you do.