Trail Blazers Hire and Fire Broadcaster Braiden Bell in the Same Day Over Teenage Tweets

Hired at Noon, Fired by Night

The Portland Trail Blazers announced Braiden Bell as their new television play-by-play broadcaster Thursday afternoon, according to KPTV in Portland. By Thursday night, he was gone.

The reversal happened after KGW reporter Devon Haskins surfaced a string of posts Bell wrote on X between November 2012 and February 2013, when he was approximately 15 years old, according to KGW's reporting cited by Awful Announcing and the New York Post. Haskins reached out to the Blazers for comment while reporting the story. The team confirmed the firing to KGW before most outlets even had time to write up the hire.

The posts, verified independently by AZ Central, the New York Post, and Sports Illustrated, include a December 9, 2012 tweet reading: "Im not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest." Another, from November 30, 2012, read: "Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w----s." A February 13, 2013 post read: "We got a sl-t alert on aisle 10."

Awful Announcing reported that KGW viewed additional posts that appeared misogynistic or racist from the same period but could not fully verify the context because linked accounts or content were no longer active. The New York Post reported that as of late Thursday night, the original posts were still visible on Bell's account before it was later set to private, according to Awful Announcing.

The Team's Response

The Blazers' statement, posted to Instagram and X and cited by every outlet reviewed, did not mince words: "The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments. 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 statement continued: "We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City."

Who Is Braiden Bell

Bell, now 29, had built a broadcasting resume that included Division I games for Arizona State University and California Baptist University, according to KPTV. He became the first play-by-play voice for the NBA G League's Valley Suns in 2024 and moved up to call games for the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury in 2025, according to AZ Central. He'd also worked ESPN+, SiriusXM, the Pac-12, and the Western Athletic Conference.

He was set to replace Kevin Calabro, who left the Blazers booth after nine seasons when the team made him what he described to The Oregonian as a "subprime" contract offer, according to Jason Quick's reporting in The Athletic, cited by Awful Announcing.

The Fairness Question

A reasonable defender of Bell would point out the posts are 13 to 14 years old and were written by a young teenager, not an adult professional broadcaster. None of the outlets reviewed found similarly offensive posts from Bell as an adult. People change. A 15-year-old's crude jokes on a platform most teenagers used recklessly at the time are a different thing than an adult broadcaster saying the same words on air or at 29. That's a real distinction, and it's one the Blazers' own statement doesn't engage with.

At the same time, the content itself isn't ambiguous. Racial resentment toward "Asian people" and repeated use of slurs for women aren't borderline jokes open to interpretation. The team had every right to decide that kind of material, however old, isn't compatible with a public-facing role representing the franchise.

Questions About the Vetting

A basic question remains unanswered: how did the Blazers put a candidate's name out publicly without first running a background check on his social media history, something any competent PR or HR department does routinely before a hire goes public? Broadcaster John Canzano wrote that the episode "amounts to a complete lack of oversight and due diligence" by the ownership group led by Tom Dundon, who bought the team in 2025. Awful Announcing similarly described the handling as "clumsy" and part of "a string of poor optics" under Dundon's ownership. Those are characterizations from those specific outlets, not facts established by the team itself. The Blazers have not released any explanation of their vetting process beyond saying they "did not meet our own bar."

The Blazers still need a play-by-play announcer for the 2026-27 season. Whether the team changes its hiring process before naming a replacement, and whether other finalists for the job faced the same scrutiny Bell's history eventually got, remain open questions the franchise hasn't addressed publicly.