Mike Breen’s signature call knows no bounds. 

Spectators. Fans. Athletes. Even fellow broadcasters can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to the phrase coined by the longtime ESPN broadcaster and lead play-by-play voice of the NBA Finals for the past 20 years—and in places far removed from the hardwood, no less. Face it, somewhere out there right now someone is uttering “BANG!” as an ode to Breen’s iconic call.  

“You bet” even Ryan Ruocco uses it, despite that popular signature call of his own as the lead play-by-play commentator for ESPN’s WNBA coverage as well as a primary voice for the network’s NBA package. “The other day, I sunk a 15-foot putt on 18 to win a match amongst my dad and our friends and I yelled ‘BANG!’ [on the golf course] when the putt went in,” says Ruocco, who followed in Breen’s footsteps at Fordham University and its radio station, WFUV 90.7 FM, in New York, where he too got his start calling games in college. “It has always been an amazing call. It’s this perfect sound of punctuation. 

“And if you were to go to any court in the country or watch kids just throwing rolled up pieces of paper in a garbage can, I can almost guarantee that the majority of them, when they make that shot, they yell ‘BANG!’” adds Ruocco, 39. “It has become that ingrained into basketball culture…into sports culture.” 

The origin of the catchphrase for Breen started at WFUV but didn’t take flight until some time later.

“As a student at Fordham, I went to pretty much every Fordham men’s basketball game. There were about 10 of us. We would sit in the stands and go nuts, like any student would do for their team. When a Fordham player would hit a big outside shot, for some reason, I just started yelling ‘BANG!’ as a fan,” explains Breen, who turned 65 in May. “And I tried it when I started broadcasting some of the games on WFUV, but I didn’t think it worked, so I shelved it. 

“A few years later, after I graduated and started doing games, I was doing this ‘High School Game of the Week’ package for SportsChannel America, and these gyms on these Friday nights were just so loud and packed and you could hardly hear yourself think. And there were some really good, exciting games, and my voice, like many, was not strong enough to override the crowd. I needed to come up with something on a big play, especially when the home team hit the shot. A nice concise call, and then I would let the crowd take over. I tried ‘BANG!’ and I thought it worked pretty well; clearly a concise call.” 

Breen notes: “I always loved the sound of the crowd when I’m watching a game at home. That’s the origin. I try and save it for big moments. It’s more of a feel thing. It’s nothing really planned. Fortunately, it has worked out nicely for me.”  

Nicely is an understatement. Breen dreamed as big as the exclamation in the phrase as a college student, along with his best friend at the station, Michael Kay. The two swore to each other that one day Breen would be the voice of his beloved Knicks and that Kay would be the voice of his boyhood team, the New York Yankees. 

Cue the BANG! 

“I don’t ever remember Mike using ‘BANG!’ at Fordham, so I think the first time I heard him use it was during a Knicks game,” admits Kay, whose signature call “See ya!” has been part of five World Series championships for baseball’s Bronx Bombers. “What stands out to me is that he is judicious with it. He holds it for special moments and that’s why it’s a special call.

“It’s become part of the NBA lexicon. When players take note of a call then you know it has entered the zeitgeist of the sport. And the most important thing is he doesn’t use it for every basket. He holds back and unleashes it at the right moment. Because of that, it becomes more special simply because people are anxiously waiting to see if the shot was worthy of his signature.”

The duo’s dreams became reality in the early ’90s. Breen’s first season with the Knicks came in 1991, when he was the radio voice of the team on WFAN. A year prior, an undrafted guard from Oklahoma State named John Starks caught on with the orange and blue. Like Breen’s signature call, Starks was a hit in the Big Apple, revered for his heart and blue-collar work ethic. He says players get into calls just as much as fans do, especially when a highlight is one of their own. 

“First time I heard the ‘BANG!’ call was an ESPN highlight of myself,” says Starks, who played with the Knicks from 1990-98 and graced the cover of SLAM 4 (March 1995) following his first All-Star campaign in 1994 that culminated with New York reaching the NBA Finals. “I think every great voice has to have a signature call. That is a signature call that nobody can copy. I’ve heard guys try to copy it, but there’s only one Mike Breen on that call. I think every player likes hearing those words because you know you’ve done something special when you get it.” 

Breen was promoted to television play-by-play for the Knicks in Starks’ final season in New York, 1997-98, replacing Marv Albert on MSG Network. Albert and his iconic signature “YES!” returned in 1999, and Breen became his backup on MSG while continuing as the lead announcer on WFAN. In 2004, he became the lead Knicks play-by-play voice on TV following Albert’s dismissal. 

In between is where fans outside of New York got their first taste of the catchphrase on the national stage. For the 1998 NBA Playoffs, Breen joined NBC as a backup on play-by-play and remained in that position until the end of the network’s coverage of the League in 2002. Breen joined ESPN as the third announcer for the 2003-04 campaign, and in February 2006, ABC passed the reins from Al Michaels to Breen, who would take over as the lead broadcaster for the Association, including the NBA Finals.  

Ian Eagle is no stranger to marquee games himself. Eagle is the longtime TV voice of the Brooklyn Nets on the YES Network and the current play-by-play lead for the NCAA Tournament since 2024. Eagle was named National Sportscaster of the Year in 2022 and 2024. He says it’s hard to rank calls, especially when debating Albert and Breen’s catchphrases—perhaps the NBA broadcasting equivalent of the Michael Jordan vs LeBron James GOAT comparison.   

“It really comes down to the eyes of the beholder,” says Eagle, who was the lead NBA voice on TNT before the network lost the rights in 2025 and now calls games on Prime Video. “If you’re thinking about a LeBron James highlight, or if you’re thinking about Steph Curry or Kobe Bryant, you’re probably thinking ‘BANG!’ But if you go back a bit and you’re more of the Michael Jordan era, a little bit of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, then ‘YES!’ is probably the call that comes to mind. I think it’s cyclical.” 

Ruocco says Breen’s call gets the nod in his book. “For me, I think it’s the best basketball call of all time. I think Marv’s ‘YES!’ is number two. I put Breen’s ‘BANG!’ number one,” Ruocco explains. “There’s something about it. It’s just what you want to say when a huge three is made, when a game-changing shot is made, when a run is punctuated. There’s also something cool and fun about yelling ‘BANG!’ It just hits and continues to hit.” 

Ruocco doesn’t remember the first time he heard Breen use “BANG!,” but he can remember a lot of significant moments when Breen used it in the NBA Finals. “I think about some of the huge threes during the Heat-Spurs series, when they had back-to-back Finals,” Ruocco says. “Like Ray Allen’s three to tie it in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, and then when the Spurs couldn’t miss in 2014 in Game 5 and they came back and won the Finals the next year after they had lost in a heartbreaking way the year before. I can remember associating those ‘BANG!’ calls with those moments.” 

Ruocco’s favorite? “The Steph Curry double bang against the Thunder in that Saturday night ABC game right before the Super Bowl in San Francisco. That was right when Steph Curry was exploding onto the scene, February 2016, and he pulls up from 35-40 feet and hits the three.” 

For Breen, it’s hard to rank the “BANG!” calls. “The Ray Allen call was special because it really determined who won the championship, because if he misses that shot, San Antonio wins the title,” Breen says. “That’s why that’s special. And when you’re a broadcaster and you prepare and you get to a big moment, you feel this responsibility to get it right for the teams, the players, the fans. It was such an unbelievable moment, an unbelievable play, and you’re glad when it comes out the right way…you find the right words and you find the right excitement level. That one is up there because it really did decide who won the championship.” 

Breen credits Albert for lessons on building drama. “I’ve learned from watching others, most notably Marv,” he says. “I’ve always had great people during the course of my career, when I first started, that helped me manage a game. Mike McCarthy was my boss at the MSG Network, and he hired me to start doing Knick games on radio. We always talked about it. It should be a crescendo, where you slowly build toward that big moment, because if you are hollering at the top of your lungs in the first quarter, your voice has nowhere to go. And you want it to be that the viewer can tell how big the moment is by the sound and the tone and the excitement in your voice. I’ve always tried to build that up over the course of the game until I get to that moment.” 

Breen used an Albert analogy to put it into perspective, too. “Marv Albert had his famous call ‘YES!’ but Marv had four different versions of it,” Breen says. “The first quarter ‘YES!’ after a guy hit his third shot in a row, the second quarter ‘YES!’ when the team is on a 15-0 run, a third quarter ‘YES!’ when the team that was down 15 now just took the lead, and then, of course, the crunch time ‘YES!’ in the fourth quarter, when the guy hits the shot and it’s either the game-winner or might be the game-winner. He’s not out there screaming ‘YES!’ at the top of his lungs in the first quarter. It builds up. I think that’s important. You want to save your high intensity calls, your top excitement level in your voice calls, for late in the game when it really matters.”  

Kay says that’s when Breen is at his best: “What makes Mike so special is how consistently excellent he is. There is never a moment that’s too big for him or gets away from him. Greatness is displayed with his metronomic nailing of every moment. If the next generation of broadcasters can watch Mike and see you don’t have to be a screamer nor someone who is setting up each call to go viral, then the business will be better because of it.” 

Color analyst Bill Raftery is 83 now and has worked with some of the most legendary voices in basketball history on his way to receiving the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006, an honor bestowed upon Breen in 2020. Raftery says he met Breen on the college circuit when the up-and-coming broadcaster was in his early 20s. He says Breen has always been a class act and that “BANG!” follows in the traditions of other legendary Knick voices, like Marty Glickman’s “Good…like Nedick’s!” and Albert’s “YES!”

“What enhances ‘BANG!’ is that the Knicks have become so good,” Raftery says. “It gravitates towards popularity the better your local team is and the team that you are covering, and with that, Mike has become national over time. And it has become a buzzword for kids all over the country, not just here in the New York area.” 

Breen says players will occasionally approach him regarding the catchphrase. “I’ll see a player after the game who may have hit a three late and they’ll ask me, ‘Did I get a BANG! on that?’” Breen explains. “Jamal Murray did it once when the Nuggets were on their championship run in 2023. He hit a big shot and as he was back tracking, he turned and pointed over toward the broadcast table and mouthed the word ‘BANG!’ It’s very humbling when that happens because the whole idea of the call and the whole idea of the job is to document what these great players are doing, and if they appreciate what you are saying, then that makes you feel good. That’s your goal: to do justice to their amazing talent.” 

For all the praise, Breen is not a fan of “the voice of the NBA” moniker. “I consider myself part of an unbelievable group of really good NBA play-by-play voices, and I’m just fortunate enough to do the NBA Finals,” he says. 

Eagle took it a step further, saying Breen is the soundtrack of the NBA. “Mike’s impact and his command of calling play-by-play, and the fact that his voice is synonymous with so many of the big moments that have happened over the course of the last 20-plus years in the NBA, he’s part of the fabric,” Eagle says. “The word ‘BANG!’, people will say that in the stands, sitting next to their buddy or with their kid or with their wife. You become part of the lexicon. You know a call has stood the test of time when friends are sharing it or texting that call when their team makes a big shot. That means it has really hit.” 

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Photos via Getty Images.