Hubie Brown, 91, to call final NBA game for ESPN this season after legendary career

This will be Hubie Brown’s last year broadcasting games for ESPN.

ESPN President Burke Magnus revealed the news Thursday while on the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina.

“We are going to give Hubie one last shot on a game,” Magnus said. “He deserves that. We think the world of him. I think it is absolutely remarkable the level in which he still calls games at age 90-plus. I don’t mean to be purposely mysterious here but we are going to honor Hubie during the regular season at some point to be determined and send him off in style.”

ESPN declined additional comment Thursday to The Athletic. Brown is not scheduled to call any games but industry sources said he will be assigned one last game this season. The date of the assignment has not been formalized yet. Brown is expected to partner with longtime ESPN/ABC play-by-play broadcaster Mike Breen for the game.

Brown, who turned 91 in September, has had one of the most extraordinary careers in basketball. He coached Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, coached against Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and called games featuring Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama.

Brown got his start in broadcasting during the 1981-82 season when he teamed up with Al Albert on the USA Network after he was fired as head coach of the Atlanta Hawks. There were coaching returns along the way (five years with the New York Knicks, from 1982-87, and three with the Memphis Grizzlies, from 2002-05), but Brown has essentially been a soundtrack for the NBA for five decades. When the Knicks fired Brown in 1987, he became a full-time analyst for CBS and then moved over to TNT in 1990 when CBS lost NBA broadcasting rights.

“I don’t think I’m 90 years old,” Brown told The Athletic last year when we named him Media Person of The Year.

“I never get up in the morning and say, ‘Geez, I’m 90 years old. What am I going to do today?’ I’m 90 years old, and I come downstairs and I get my manila pad out, and I have a list of all the things I’m going to do today. Then, at night, I have a list of which games I’m going to watch. Then, during the games, I’m going to pick out certain things I’m interested in. It’s always the love of the game for me.”

Dave Pasch, one of the many play-by-play broadcasters Brown has worked with over the years, said Brown never lost his passion for calling games.

“He does two things during commercial breaks that obviously the audience isn’t privy to,” Pasch said. “First, he regularly asks me if I am getting enough time to call the game, how things sound and if we are working in tandem. Hubie is an incredible teammate. We spend a decent amount of time together off the air and normally have dinner the night before the game. He treats me like I am part of his family, and that comes through in our communication on game day. The second thing Hubie does is point out important stats on the box score that stand out to him. It helps me as his broadcast partner because it gives me a sense of what is important to him, where to lead him, or to reemphasize later in the broadcast.”

Brown had worked about 15 games each season between 2020 and 2023 for ESPN/ABC. He worked mostly on one-year contracts as ESPN kept extending him.

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(Photo: Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)