ESPN’s Mike Breen Talks New York Knicks’ NBA Championship with Rich

The Knicks are NBA champions, and the man who has called more NBA Finals than anyone working today got to watch the city he has lived in his whole life come undone with joy. Mike Breen, fresh off his 21st consecutive Finals for ESPN and ABC, joined Rich to make sense of a moment he admitted he had never seen before.

"I've never seen anything like it," Breen said of the scenes around New York. He reached for a Roger Angell essay on what it means to be a fan, the idea of caring so much "that you become this irrational person in so many ways." His own son Matt, 29, watched Game 5 with friends and walked three blocks afterward. "Dad, I hugged like 80 strangers," Matt told him. As Breen put it, when does that ever happen in New York?

Asked what the championship means, Breen called it one of the great moments in New York sports history, and he laid out why. New York has always been a basketball town. The team is one the entire city gets behind. And the fans never left, even through years Breen flatly described as rough. To stick with a team through that and then watch it win, with players he called high-character individuals who carry themselves the right way, made the payoff that much bigger.

A lot of that, in Breen's telling, runs through Jalen Brunson. He praised Brunson's toughness, his refusal to give up, and one trait he said goes underrated: Brunson is extremely coachable, even at this level. When the star takes guff from the coaching staff, the rest of the team follows. And yes, that coaching staff includes Brunson's father, Rick. Breen pushed back hard on the old "they're coddling Jalen" narrative. Rich pointed to the now-viral moment of Rick telling Jalen to knock off the complaining during the Atlanta series. The opposite of coddling.

For a favorite Brunson story, Breen went back to an early playoff loss to Miami, when Brunson mishandled a possession and the Knicks were eliminated. "He was devastated. Like devastated," Breen said. That, to him, is the point: plenty of players want to win, but how many are truly devastated to lose? Breen has taken heat for comparing Brunson's will to Kobe Bryant's. He stands by it, and figures Kobe would too.

On a day like this, Breen found himself thinking about the people who came before. His father, a Marine and construction worker he considered the strongest man in the world, with Dave DeBusschere a close second in young Mike's eyes. His own kids, now grown, who sat through years of bad basketball. And Marv Albert, the broadcaster who made Breen fall in love with the job. "It's Marv inside of me," he said, admitting he had hoped to slip a "Yes, and it counts!" into the clinch as a tribute to Albert's signature call, but the right play never came.

Breen also shared his postgame moments with Knicks greats. Walt "Clyde" Frazier, a friend he calls one of the blessings of his life, spoke about this team with a reverence Breen had never heard him use, even comparing Brunson to Willis Reed. And Patrick Ewing, brought back into the fold by the franchise, was overcome. "I'm finally getting my ring," Ewing said.

There was a numbers note too. Red Holzman's 613 hangs in the Garden rafters, and the Knicks clinched on 6/13. As for the parade Thursday, Breen isn't missing it. "There's not a chance I would miss that."