This article was written by Matt Foley and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.* * * * *
I guess we’re still doing this, huh?
The Portland Trail Blazers hired 29-year-old Braiden Bell as their new television play-by-play announcer Thursday. A few hours later, they fired him.
Apparently, offensive tweets Bell posted as a teenager had emerged.
Bell was set to replace longtime Blazers broadcaster Kevin Calabro and, at 29, become the youngest play-by-play announcer in the NBA. But when old social media posts containing racist and misogynistic comments surfaced, Portland immediately reversed course. Call it the Shane Gillis treatment.
“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,” the organization said in a statement. “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.”
— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) October 2, 2026
Bell wrote the offensive posts in 2012 and 2013, when he was a teenager.
According to CBS Sports, KGW — the outlet that initially uncovered the posts — reports no offensive posts from Bell have been found since he became an adult. From 2015 onward, his account reportedly became almost entirely about sports.
Here are a couple examples of the questionable posts:
“I’m not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest.” in a tweet on Dec. 9, 2012. The tweet has since been deleted.
Another tweet on Nov. 30, 2012 read “Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w–res.”
Rude and insensitive? Absolutely.
Representative of a teenager with an undeveloped prefrontal cortex? You bet.
To be clear, nobody needs to defend what Bell wrote as a teenager. Some of it was ugly. But teenagers also have an extensive track record of saying breathtakingly stupid things.
So, I guess the message here is to teach your kids that there is zero margin for mistakes. Zero room for growth.
We have to stop firing people for tweets sent when they were minors. If this guy had robbed a store as a minor, his juvenile record would be sealed forever. If we don’t hold people accountable for crimes as minors, holding people accountable for Tweets is beyond absurd. https://t.co/xb3xtWzkAP
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) October 2, 2026
We’re entering an era where young professionals will have all been raised on social media. If organizations are going to waste their time combing through decades of internet history just to prove they align with the right politics, we’re all in trouble.
Bell has spent his adult years actually building the career Portland believed qualified him for the job. He previously called games for the Phoenix Mercury and the G League’s Valley Suns. The Blazers interviewed him, evaluated his work, and decided he was good enough to become the television voice of an NBA franchise.
His biggest mistake was thinking all that work meant more than a few dumb posts so deep on his timeline that he’d probably forgotten they existed.
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