Mike Breen is the best play-by-play voice in the NBA, but even those who are great at their craft slip up on occasion.
Breen joined the latest episode of The Old Man & the Three podcast with JJ Redick and Tommy Alter. During the hour-long interview, Redick, who now calls games with Breen on occasion, asked the Hall of Fame broadcaster how he measures his performance.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect broadcast,” Breen said on the podcast. “It’s more of a feeling…Playing basketball is a team sport, broadcasting basketball is a team sport. You’ve got to make sure your teammates are happy, you’re happy, and when that all comes together, there’s no better feeling when you finish and everybody feels like, ‘wow, we kicked ass on that.’”
Alter followed-up by asking Breen if there’s a call he wishes was handled differently. After a chuckle that implied there is more than one, Breen recalled a recent call that could have used a mulligan.
“There was one last year in the playoffs,” Breen remembered. “It was in the first round and it was Game 1, Nets and Celtics. It was a fantastic game and I think we even said it at some point in the fourth quarter, I said to Tim Corrigan who was producing, ‘it’s all clicking.’ The feeling was great. And then Jayson Tatum hits a shot at the end, and I butchered the call as badly as I’ve ever butchered a big call at the end of the game.”
Here’s the call:
It definitely wasn’t a call that will join Breen in the Basketball Hall of Fame. After Tatum hits the buzzer beater, Breen said “Celtics go up by one!” instead of noting it was a game winner. Then Breen said the refs waved off the bucket, when they were just going to confirm there was no time left on the clock.
“They’re waving off whether or not to check to see if the game ended. The basket counts. As Tatum puts it in, the officials going to the scoreboard,” Breen said in a moment.
It was a really choppy way to describe what was going on as the officials attempted to keep the Celtics from storming the court in case they needed to add a fraction of a second back onto the clock. Breen sounded uncharacteristically flustered during the call.
“I couldn’t sleep the next two days,” Breen told Redick and Alter. “If that was ten years ago, it probably would have been a two-week period. The reason I was so mad that I screwed it up was because the whole crew knocked it out of the park and by one second at the very end, I blew the call.”
Ninety-nine percent of Breen’s calls are near perfection. But every announcer has a list of on-air moments that they would like back, and hopefully, this won’t be the last time Breen butchers a call because that means he’ll be broadcasting important games for years to come.
[The Old Man & the Three, NBA]
