No, the Portland Trail Blazers shouldn't reinstate Braiden Bell. The loudest argument for it, that a man can't be defined forever by what he typed at 15, is true and beside the point. The people who owe you an explanation here are the ones who hired him.
Run the day back. Just after noon on Thursday, Oct. 1, the Blazers introduced Bell with a press release calling him "a great fit" and "an important voice for the next chapter of Trail Blazers basketball." By a little after 8 that night, they'd fired him, saying they had "zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments" and "will not be moving forward with this broadcaster." His tenure lasted about eight hours. KGW's Devon Haskins found the racist and misogynistic posts from 2012 and 2013 and asked the team to comment. Their answer was a pink slip.
The standard the Blazers actually set is zero tolerance for being embarrassed in public by their own hiring. The posts were out there the whole time. One of them, from December 2012, read "I'm not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest." It's on a public account Bell had been using for more than a decade, and the posts hadn't been deleted as of the night they let him go. A functioning front office finds that in an afternoon. This one found out when a TV station called.
The guy they hired to run a broadcast booth kept an "Asian people piss me off" tweet live on his timeline into his late twenties, and the team that hired him is now partly owned by the founders of Panda Express. You couldn't script that mismatch, and still nobody at the team opened his feed before putting out a release about an "important voice."
Now the part his camp wants you to sit with. On Oct. 2, Bell apologized: "I am deeply sorry for the language that I used on Twitter." On Oct. 5, his attorney Arnie Herz asked the Blazers to reconsider and made the argument doing the heavy lifting on every comment thread: "What he is asking is whether a boy's words from fourteen years ago should outweigh everything the man has done since. If that is the standard, there is hardly a person in any organization in America who could meet it."
That's a good line. It's also lawyering. A 15-year-old's cruelty shouldn't be a life sentence, and the reporting didn't turn up offensive posts from Bell as an adult: by the back half of 2015, his public account was basically sports. If this were only about a teenager growing up, I'd be on Bell's side. The snag is the undeleted part. The apology and the hired-counsel contrition both arrive after the firing, after the job was gone, with the posts he never got around to taking down sitting there for ten years. "He has owned it," says the man who owned it on Friday.
Keep the door shut. A team that reverses a zero-tolerance statement the moment a lawyer sends a letter is a weathervane. The Blazers answered the reinstatement request the only way they could without looking ridiculous: "We stand by our statement issued last week," no money, no job, "we wish Mr. Bell the best." As of Oct. 6, that's a closed door, and it should stay closed.
But save some contempt for the right target. Bell made the posts and left them up; that's on him. The team introduced a stranger as the voice of the franchise without reading his public timeline, then fired him by dinner and let him carry the mess out the door alone. If anyone in that building believes in a standard, they should apply it to whoever signed off on an eight-hour hire.
