The Portland Trail Blazers fired play-by-play broadcaster Braiden Bell the same day they hired him after old X posts from his teenage years resurfaced and drew scrutiny.
The team announced Bell as its new television voice earlier in the day, then reversed course hours later once posts from 2012 and 2013 came back into public view. A KGW journalist in Portland spotted the material and contacted the club for comment before the Blazers said they would not move forward with him.
The New York Post reported that Bell, now 29, wrote the messages when he was roughly 15. As of late Thursday night, posts using that language remained visible on his X account.
Bell had been tapped to succeed longtime Trail Blazers voice Kevin Calabro, who told The Oregonian he was leaving after a “subprime” contract offer. The hire collapsed almost as soon as it was made public.
One message, dated Dec. 9, 2012, read:
Bell wrote, “I’m not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest,”
Several weeks earlier he posted, “Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w, s.”
On Feb. 13, 2013, another post said, “We got a slut alert on aisle 10,”
KGW noted it had not found offensive posts from Bell once he reached adult age. The damage still landed on the day of the announcement.
The Portland Trail Blazers posted a public statement on X after the posts surfaced.
“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,”
the team said.
“Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster.”
The club went further on the standard it claims for the job.
“The play-by-play role carries a long legacy of excellence, on the broadcast and in character, and we hold that standard without exception. We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City. We believe strongly that everyone who is a part of Rip City should feel welcome and safe and we will make sure that our new broadcaster reflects these values. We will do better.”
Bell had not publicly commented on the firing.
Bell graduated from Arizona State in 2019. He called games for Cal Baptist and ASU on ESPN+, and later handled play-by-play for the Suns’ G League team and the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury.
That résumé was enough for Portland to put his name on the hire. It was not enough to survive a same-day review of posts written more than a decade earlier, when he was still in his mid-teens.
The team’s own statement admitted the process failed its bar. A local reporter found what the club’s vetting did not catch before the announcement went out. Fans got an apology. Bell lost the job before he ever called a Blazers game.
Corporate sports will keep hunting teenage drafts on old accounts and calling it standards. Grown men still get erased for what a 15-year-old typed.
