The Portland Trail Blazers spent Thursday morning introducing a new television voice and Thursday night explaining why he would not be calling their games.
The team announced 29-year-old Braiden Bell as its next play-by-play broadcaster, praising the energy he had brought to calls for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury and the G League’s Valley Suns. Hours later, after KGW reporters surfaced posts from 2012 and 2013, the franchise cut ties and said it would not move forward with the hire. Bell, then about 15, had written on the same account he still used as an adult. The posts included a remark that he was “not racist at all” before saying Asian people “piss me off,” along with crude, demeaning language about women. KGW reported that it did not find comparable posts once Bell was an adult, and that from 2015 on the feed was almost entirely about sports.
The Blazers’ statement left little room for nuance. The organization said it has zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments, called the posts a clear violation of team and league policies, and apologized to fans and to Rip City for missing them in the vetting process. It said the play-by-play chair carries a legacy of excellence on the air and in character, and that the next broadcaster would have to reflect those values. Bell’s account was later made private. He had been lined up to work with analyst Lamar Hurd and sideline reporter Brooke Olzendam, replacing Kevin Calabro, who was let go this summer after nine seasons amid a wider round of cuts under owner Thomas Dundon.
That leaves the Blazers back where they started, with preseason tipping next week and the regular season opening Oct. 21.
The episode also reopens a question the league keeps answering the same way: should a job disappear over something posted as a teenager? The posts were ugly. They targeted people by race and by sex, and they sat on a public account for more than a decade. A franchise that sells itself as a community institution has a reasonable interest in who speaks for it every night. At the same time, the record KGW described shows no pattern of the same language in adulthood, only a sports feed. Bell was a minor when he wrote them. Plenty of adults would not survive a full scrape of their high-school group chats. The Blazers chose the cleaner public line — zero tolerance, apology, restart — over any argument about growth or context. Whether that standard is fair is a separate argument from whether the tweets were acceptable. On Thursday, only one of those questions decided the job.
