The Portland Trail Blazers should not have fired Braiden Bell. The reason they did is worse than the thing they fired him for.
On Thursday the Blazers announced Bell as their new TV play-by-play voice, replacing longtime broadcaster Kevin Calabro and calling games alongside Lamar Hurd and Brooke Olzendam. He'd called games for the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury and the G League's Valley Suns, and he would have been the NBA's youngest primary play-by-play announcer. Hours later, they fired him.
Nothing about Bell changed in those hours. KGW reporter Devon Haskins found tweets Bell posted in 2012 and 2013, when he was around 15, and asked the team for comment. The team answered several hours later by firing him. Portland got caught not reading an account Bell, now 29, still actively uses for sports commentary, where those posts were sitting undeleted on Thursday evening for anyone who cared to scroll.
The posts themselves are bad, and pretending otherwise does Bell no favors. In December 2012 he wrote, "I'm not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest." In July 2013, "no blacks either. #racist." On the misogyny side: "Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w--res." There was a "sl-t alert on aisle 10." This is racist and it's cruel. Nobody defending Bell needs to excuse a syllable of it.
But KGW's own review turned up nothing comparable once Bell became an adult. From 2015 on, the same account was almost entirely sports. Other outlets found the same thing. The case against Bell is a pile of posts written by a ninth grader, with no adult version to match them. A 15-year-old's worst day online doesn't tell you much about the man he became at 29. If you genuinely believe people can't grow between 15 and 29, you're describing a world with no redemption for anyone, including yourself.
Bell apologized Friday on X, calling the language "wrong" and saying it was written "14 years ago while I was only 15 years old" and has "no reflection of who I am today." The reporting backs him up.
Consider who's doing the firing. This is the same organization that chased and hired Chauncey Billups as head coach despite a 1997 sexual assault allegation, ran its own internal investigation that then-president Neil Olshey said "corroborated what Chauncey told us, that nothing non-consensual occurred," and stood by him through several seasons. No charges were ever filed and the suit was settled, but the point stands: when the accused was a star adult the franchise wanted, Portland built a process to keep him. When it was a young broadcaster with no tenure and nothing but teenage posts, the process was a press release deleting him by nightfall.
The broadcasting business has never actually demanded the standard Portland just invented. Marv Albert pleaded guilty to assault and battery in 1997 for biting a 42-year-old woman and lost his NBC job. By 1998 he was calling Knicks radio, by 1999 he had TNT's lead NBA chair, and by 2000 NBC had hired him back. He worked the booth for decades after. An adult pled guilty to a crime against a real victim and got a 20-year second act. A teenager typed slurs into Twitter and got nothing.
The coldest defense of Portland's move is that Bell had just been hired, so cutting him cost the team almost nothing, and anyone taking a public microphone should arrive clean. That first part is true, and it's exactly the problem: firing Bell cost nothing and took no courage. The Blazers were protecting themselves. If you want a clean hire, you vet before the announcement, not after a reporter calls.
The Blazers admitted part of this. One statement read, "We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City." They apologized for the vetting. They haven't reckoned with the fact that their botched vetting is the only reason a man is now unemployed over something he did at 15.
A regional radio host, Gee, put it bluntly while condemning the tweets himself: "Was it racist? Absolutely. Was it ugly? Absolutely... But the Trail Blazers, respectfully, you're garbage for firing him." He's right. The posts belong to a kid who no longer exists. The panic belongs to a billion-dollar franchise that couldn't be bothered to read a Twitter account until a journalist forced its hand, then made a 29-year-old pay for it.
