A few days before the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals, Kevin Harlan called Mike Breen and offered to give him the series.
Breen told Dexter Henry of the New York Post that Harlan, who had been assigned Knicks-Pacers on TNT, wanted him to have it instead. ESPN had drawn the Western Conference Finals that year, which meant Breen was headed to Oklahoma City and Minnesota while New York — the team he had called in some capacity for over three deacdes — was playing for a Finals berth on another network.
“You’ve been waiting almost three decades,” Breen recalled Harlan telling him. “I want you to call the games for TNT. I’m gonna go to my bosses, I’m gonna tell them that you should do it, and I’ll go do the West for ESPN.”
Mike Breen tells @DHenryTV how much it meant to him that Kevin Harlan actually offered to let him call the Knicks-Pacers Eastern Conference Finals on TNT last season.
Full conversation –> https://t.co/fkcDCEjNqYpic.twitter.com/5Cm6Mts1Wg
— New York Post Sports (@nypostsports) May 29, 2026
Harlan had already figured out what would happen if ESPN didn’t want him in exchange. Whether they used Dave Pasch or Mark Jones, he said, he was fine with it. He was willing to sit out the conference finals if it meant Breen got New York.
He told Breen to think it over and called back the next day. Both men arrived at the same conclusion — that going through with it wasn’t the right thing for their employers — but the offer had already done what it was going to do. Harlan called Knicks-Pacers on TNT, a series everyone in the building understood was in its final playoff assignment, and Breen called Thunder-Wolves on ESPN.
“This was not some gratuitous ‘Oh, let me throw this offer out there,’” Breen said. “He wanted to do that for a friend. I was so touched by the fact that he thought that way. But, again, that’s the man he is.”
Harlan has never called an NBA Finals, and at 65, with a reduced schedule at Prime Video this past season, he almost certainly never will. The Finals have stayed with ESPN since 2006, and Breen has called 20 (soon to be 21) consecutive championship series as a result, while Harlan spent those years doing some of the best play-by-play work in the sport on TNT and watching the Finals from the other side of the rights split every June. The series he was giving away last spring — which served as the last playoff assignment for TNT’s NBA coverage — was about as good as his postseason got. And his instinct, in that moment, was to hand it to Breen.
Breen does eventually get his Knicks in a Finals, just not the one Harlan tried to arrange. He’ll call New York’s first Finals appearance in 27 years, starting June 3 on ABC, alongside Richard Jefferson and Tim Legler. On The Zach Lowe Show last week, Harlan said he has never really felt like he missed the Finals because Breen has been such a central voice for their whole generation of announcers, that he has lived through it in Breen’s eyes and voice and friendship, and feels like he’s right there with him every June.
Harlan will watch him do it again in just a few days, which, it turns out, is more or less exactly what he told Breen he was prepared to do a year ago.
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