By the Power of GraySkull....and Deadspin.

Friday, June 16, 2006













So Deadspin posed this question at the end of its NBA post this morning. (A statement: Mike Breen and Hubie Brown are a perfectly acceptable broadcast team. Discuss.) As you can expect with the collection of jokers they have in the comments section....hilarity ensued. (Make sure to click on everyone's names and check out their pages as well....some good stuff out there)

Hubie Brown in high definition was enough for me to get my pitchfork and torch ready. Fire bad! - Rob Iracane

Very good point Robbie. Hubie is a scary guy, but we do have to remember one thing....he was born in 1933. We can't always keep our stellar Good Looks

Mike Breen is ok, but Hubie Brown makes me want to smother myself with a pillow. Once again, nice tights, Dwayne Wade. I need a time-out now, and I think Hubie would approve.
- Juancho

Mike Breen doesn't actually make me angry, so that's good...but I swear to God, the next time Hubie Brown watches a replay of a totally BS foul and says "That was a good call," I'm going to break the television, and I really don't want to do that.
-Diddly

Two things:
1) The Miami coaching staff should all wear white sport coats. They're ruining everything.
2) I have no problem with Breen and Brown (who again, looks like Lady Elaine from the Mister Rogers show). But Stuart Scott's glasses are fucking out of control. I could cut a diamond looking at his left eye.
-Big Daddy Drew

Now that's funny....that witch scared the crap out of me when I was younger. Almost as bad as Hubie scares me now.

I'd still rather have Marv Albert.
- Tom

There is a level of importance you feel when Marv is calling a game. I think that's the biggest problem with Mike Breen calling a game....you've never really heard him before, so it lacks the feeling of the BIG game. You have to go back to 2004 when Al Michaels was calling the action, but one Glenn Anton "Doc" Rivers ruined that Finals for me.

I thought hubie was going to run out onto the court and fellate james posey.but all is forgiven, i can't dislike the same guy from the old school usa network draft coverage.
- Unsilent Majority

Another great point...Hubie seems to go nuts when his former players do something great. All of them except.....

My favorite part of the Finals is when Hubie pretends he didn't coach Jason Williams last year and is over-nice about his game. Actually Hubie, just say what you want and get it over.
Also very funny; when Breen undercuts something Hubie says. Like when Hubie was raving about Nowitski and Howard getting on the boards for Game 1 and, as they were cutting to commercial, Breen says, "Jason Terry's 32 points certainly helped." Classic.
- FromKirbyToKG

I still remember that game like it was yesterday....Last Year was the first year I had the Ticket, and for some reason I was watching that game. And when White Chocolate went off on Hubie's son you could see it was the beginning of the end (or the start of "Health Problems") On a side note, I just found out that Hubie was succeeded as coach not once, but twice by Mike Fratello (boy do I wish he was still commentating).

Best was when they did the live "listen-in" to the German announce team and there was pretty much complete silence until Terry got called for the travel. Then Hubie says "You know, there's alot of people out there saying 'Hey, we like those guys better'"......I couldn't agree more.
- Blooker

Blooker stole my thunder with this one because I was going to write about it later today, but hey let's write about it now. The best part of this exchange was (just before he made the comment that people might like those guys better than Mike and Hubie) Shaq catching an Oop and the German announcer saying, "Dah! Ohhh! Shaquille Oneal!!!"

I guess if I had been coaching since the Battle of Hastings, I'd be stuck constantly speaking in the 2nd person, too. "You're on the field of battle, and you're witnessing the first use of the bow and arrow in war. You're confused and scared. You take a timeout."
- Chopper Dave

Ahh History references worked in.....now we're playing with fire.

Any team that is half Hubie is way too far disadvantaged to be considered "Finals-worthy". The only place I want to see (or hear) Hubie is on the bench of a team my team is playing against.
That said, I would pay big money to hear Walton and Hubie do the Battle of Hastings - hilarious, chopper dave.
- farlane

Mike Breen and Hubie Brown are okay, but man do I miss Bill Walton. Walton and Mike Tirico as straight man are the best combo ABC's got... Sometimes when I get bored I imagine the hyperbolic invective Walton would have spewed during Shaq's five-point game.
- Captain Caveman

I really do think the world would have stopped spinning. It would have been followed by a four hour diatribe on how Bill Russell would have put up 42-19-8-4-3 against Shaq in his prime.

On an aside, I threw up a little in my mouth yesterday with Chris Berman was running down the leaderboard and said Kenneth "Staten Island" Ferrie. The dude is from the Netherlands for Christ sake. Somewhere Scott Van Pelt is crying.
-AJY

No comment.

Amen AJY... I caught 15 seconds of ESPN yesterday, and of course it had to be Berman. You're with me, remote... let's find a Seinfeld rerun.
- Steve S

And my personal favorite....
Great timeout by Juancho.
Captain Caveman, couldn't agree more. I thought I hated Walton, but I think I miss him. In a sheries like thish, it's the legendary playersh of the game that musht rishe to the occashion. The comaradarie, the discipline, the excellence, the thrill too succeed. Coach Wooden taught me that when you are on the presipishce of glory you must seize the moment.
- Killa Sam

It gets no better than making fun of someone's lisp. And I have to say that the wording used was pretty spot on. I was going to give it an 8 out of 10 because of length (Bill Walton would have spoke for another three or four paragraphs) But because of the use of the word presipishce you get a 9 out of 10 Sambo.

Final Verdict for Deadspin: My personal opinion is that Mike Breen isn't bad at all. But the problem seems to be that he hasn't had enough big games under his belt to be calling a finals. There was one slip up that he had, which was barely noticeable....Hubie threw out the stat that with two made free throws Dirk would pass Michael Jordan at 181 with the most free throws made in a single Playoffs. Breen responded, "181 Free Throws in a series is pretty impressive." Allbeit a ticky tack call on my part it's pretty funny if you add up the points Dirk would have for the series....Game 1-76, Game 2-86, Game 3- 90. (FYI- The record is 86 by Jerry West in only a 6-game series)

Skeletor is a different animal all together. Hubie's brilliant comments (like noting that Wade was only the fourth player in Finals History to post a 40 and 10 game [West, Magic, Jordan]) are completely overshadowed by comments like This, the 2nd person talk, or challenging only himself on how many times he can say upside in a given draft/say that a good timeout was call. Some might say that it's pretty bad to "call out"/"make fun" of a 73 year old man, but if I couldn't....I don't know what I'd do with myself.

(Thanks everyone for the comments. If I'm missing anyone's site feel free to post it in the comments and I will update the page later.)

Posted by Awful Announcing- at 11:48 AM

2 Comments:

Honestly, this was great. I was glad to bring my Marv Albert love to the table. If Awful Announcing and Deadspin could team up like this more often (or in some planned manner) it would be gold, pure gold. I get more information from Deadspin commentors than anyone else.

A.T. Bianchi said...
Jun 16, 2006, 2:04:00 PM  

Old Hubie. Did anyone else catch him on Mike and Mike during the finals (I am at work by myself and nothing else is on ok, that's why I "watch"....sigh)? Anyway, Hubie rambled on for like 10 minutes about how guys need to get to the line and just repeated the same things over and over again using words like "therefor" and "herewith". Urgh!!!!

Anonymous said...
Jun 29, 2006, 1:05:00 AM  

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