Niagara’s Hubie Brown approaches his final NBA broadcast

The night before Brown goes on the air for an NBA broadcast, he and his broadcasting partners will break bread at a restaurant in an NBA city, but the discussion inevitably turns to basketball, his lifelong forte.

Brown will grab a set of salt and pepper shakers, a set of cutlery and even a crusty bread roll to explain to the people around him – usually other broadcasters and former basketball players – a specific basketball concept.

“He’s lining them up to show how someone comes off the screen and cuts to a certain spot,” said Mike Breen, the lead NBA announcer for ESPN and ABC. “He’s diagramming plays on the dinner table, but he’s so willing to share that knowledge with everybody.”

Breen will be part of a closing chapter of broadcasting and basketball history. He’ll join Brown, a 1955 Niagara graduate and a 2005 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, as he calls his last NBA game at 2 p.m. Sunday. That’s when the Philadelphia 76ers play the Milwaukee Bucks at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.

Brown is 91 years old and is considered one of the all-time great basketball broadcasters. He combines his knowledge of the sport with an acute ability to communicate complicated schemes into something consumable, whether it’s for the NBA die-hard or the casual basketball watcher.

It’s not just the mark of a basketball lifer. His colleagues, mentees and peers from Western New York and across the country say it’s the mark of a teacher, one whose need for knowledge is persistent, even in his eighth decade in college or pro basketball.

“It’s that intellectual curiosity,” said Jack Armstrong, who broadcasts Toronto Raptors games and coached Niagara’s men’s basketball team from 1989-98. “There’s a passion and a love affair and a drive. What wags your tail every day? What are your passions, your goals, what gets you out of bed and motivates you?

“He’s had an incredible career, but there’s still that twinkle in his eye, the curiousness about it.”

Breen has seen his colleague’s continued growth. It’s been a key to Brown’s longevity.

“As the game changed, he changed with the game,” Breen said. “He thought, ‘Today’s player, they play a different game, but they’re so special and talented and skilled,’ and he evolved with that.”

Niagara has produced three Basketball Hall of Famers: Calvin Murphy, the guard who led the Purple Eagles to the 1970 NCAA Tournament; Larry Costello, who was one of the NBA’s most innovative coaches; and Brown, a New Jersey native who was a player with the Purple Eagles in the 1950s.

Brown coached college basketball from 1967-72 at William & Mary and Duke, then joined the Milwaukee Bucks as an assistant in 1972. He was on a staff led by Costello, his former Niagara teammate. With superstars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bob Dandridge and Oscar Robertson, the Bucks reached the 1974 NBA Finals but lost to the Boston Celtics.

Brown went 528-559 in 15 seasons as a head coach in the NBA and in the American Basketball Association. In 1975, he coached the Kentucky Colonels to the ABA championship, then coached in the NBA with the Atlanta Hawks (1976-81), New York Knicks (1982-86) and Memphis Grizzlies (2002-04).

Brown was the Grizzlies coach during the organization’s first 50-win season in 2003-04 but retired from coaching 12 games into the 2004-05 season.

“What he did as a coach, in the NBA, was tremendous with the Knicks and Hawks, but to leave the league and come back 20 years later – a 20-year gap – and take a moribund Grizzlies team and organization, and turn them into a 50-win team, that’s incredible, having been away from it,” said Adrian Wojnarowski, a longtime NBA insider with ESPN who is now general manager of the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball program.

“He was just a great example for guys who played for them. He made them better, helped them win, and that commands respect.”

Brown cited health issues when he resigned, but multiple outlets later reported strife in the Grizzlies locker room between Brown and players. His abrupt end to coaching, though, became his segue into his term as a full-time broadcaster.

Brown began calling basketball games in 1982 with USA Network, then resumed calling games in 1985 with CBS. He wove his coaching career with his broadcasting career for the next 19 years, working with CBS and TNT, then joined ABC as its top NBA analyst when he returned to broadcasting after coaching in Memphis. He called games on ABC and ESPN and contributed to ESPN Radio’s coverage of the NBA playoffs.

His niche wasn’t just on the mic. Armstrong remembers attending a clinic as an assistant at Fordham. He was among more than 600 high school and college coaches in attendance, listening to basketball coaching dignitaries such as Chuck Daly, Bobby Knight, John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski and Brown.

“Hubie was, by far, the most interesting, passionate and detailed,” Armstrong said. “He just killed it.”

That nature as a coach and teacher translated to the NBA level.

Fran Fraschilla, a former college coach and college basketball broadcaster with ESPN, describes Brown in coaching terms: “You know he’s going to give you 15 and nine, every night. Everybody in the league loves this guy. He’s going to score at a high rate in the painted area.”

Fraschilla offers another way of describing Brown: “A basketball savant.”

And yet another way: “When you talk about joy for the game, there’s nobody that epitomizes that more, with the possible exception of our late friend Bill Walton, that epitomizes the joy for the game, but also the teaching and explaining of complicated basketball things in a simple way.”

A quick YouTube query of Brown’s most astute and explanatory calls includes a moment during the 2005 NBA Finals, when he described the impact of 20-year-old LeBron James, who was sitting in the stands during the series between the Detroit Pistons and the San Antonio Spurs. Brown compared James’ statistical output to greats such as Robertson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan.

He also colorfully compared the style of play in the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s to the current state of the league.

“For people who never saw basketball in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, OK, they should see the ‘30 for 30’ on the Bad Boys, and then your appreciation of Michael Jordan, of how many times they tripped Michael Jordan to the floor, and there was no such thing as a flagrant foul,” Brown said, during a broadcast of a Cleveland-Milwaukee game in October 2017. “There was a two-shot foul and the guys stayed there.

“So, if you want to know what the difference is between that and today, just start that ‘30 for 30’ on the Bad Boys of Detroit.”

His broadcasting voice is a combination of cerebral teacher, tactician/coach and well-read authority figure, with more than just a hint of the New York/New Jersey area to it. Think of the history teacher who prepared you for an Advanced Placement exam, or the coach who broke down film to prepare you for the state championship game.

“It’s very direct and very easy to understand,” Breen said. “That’s what’s made it such an appeal to fans. They can tell exactly what he’s talking about. He tells you what’s good on the court, what’s bad, what makes him happy and upset. If a player or a team plays beautiful basketball, you hear the joy in his voice.”

And what astounds Wojnarowski is the fact that Brown, at 91, hasn’t missed a beat, maintaining both a recall of history and a desire to learn and evolve through the whirlwind of each changing season.

“He never slips up,” Wojnarowski said. “The acuteness, it’s just amazing. We think of our own parents and a grandparent, and to imagine them doing what he’s done. But the travel, the preparation, the shootaround, the airport – all that goes into doing that job. Every single time he’s on, or I would see him, it would blow me away.”

Brown’s voice and perspective don’t just come from years of experience, and Brown has quite a few. They come from Brown’s continued desire to absorb everything about the sport, even at 91. And that means doing it the old-school way. Sometimes that means approaching the broadcast like being a teacher in a classroom.

“He was a terrific ABA coach and an NBA coach, but he’s always been a teacher’s coach,” said Armstrong, the former Niagara coach and current Raptors broadcaster. “Listen to him on the air now, and he’s always been all of those things. But he doesn’t try to talk over peoples’ heads. He doesn’t pontificate or act like, ‘I know more than you and I’m smarter than you.’ He is respectful of the audience.”

Much of the time, it’s about his fastidious preparation. Brown’s workload has minimized – he has called about 15 games per season for ESPN and ABC since 2020, but he still expects to be at the top of his game. Even as his lengthy broadcasting chapter comes to a close.

Jimmy Dykes, a college basketball analyst with ESPN, recently saw Brown during a Lakers-Nuggets game in Denver. Brown was armed with his trusty notebook, the one with yellow paper, its pages covered in handwritten notes about each team and each player.

“That’s how I still do it,” Dykes said. “I handwrite it. That’s how I try to memorize it.

“Hubie Brown is a guy that coaches listen to, because he does his homework. He knows the game. He studies it. He gives great insight. For guys like Fran and I, he is the gold standard.”

Adrian Wojnarowski, St. Bonaventure general manager: “He is widely considered the greatest basketball clinician who ever lived. I’ve never heard anyone, and you talk to coaches about how Hubie Brown taught the game and drills – high school, college, NBA coaches – they will all tell you about this drill, a philosophy, the teachings … he brought it to the general public in a clear, succinct and insightful way.”

Jack Armstrong, Toronto Raptors broadcaster and former Niagara coach: “In a game where broadcasting is about sizzle and style, Hubie is about substance. Our game, and in all of sports, I think back to the Mount Rushmore of broadcasters: John Madden (NFL), Dick Vitale and Bill Raftery (college basketball), Don Cherry (NHL) and Hubie Brown. All ex-coaches.

“Any time you hear Hubie on the air, you’re getting back to the substance, why we love the game and play the game, and why it’s great.”

Joe Mihalich, former Niagara, Hofstra coach: “He’s one of a kind because he gets it out. He makes his points so clearly, and he does it in a few sentences.”

Juan Mendez, 2005 MAAC player of the year at Niagara: “If you look at his track record, he is the epitome of broadcasting in the NBA. He was a coach at one point, but he has done it all. He has been a pioneer at the pro level. For us to say we had Hubie Brown as a part of our legacy at Niagara, it shows the type of character we build and create.

“He’s a Niagara graduate. What do you expect?”