Trail Blazers Fire Braiden Bell Hours After Hiring Him as TV Voice Over Resurfaced Teen Posts

The short version: The Portland Trail Blazers hired a new television play-by-play voice on Thursday morning — and fired him Thursday night. Braiden Bell, 29, was announced as the replacement for longtime broadcaster Kevin Calabro, set to call games alongside Lamar Hurd and Brooke Olzendam on the Rip City Television Network. Hours later, after a KGW-TV reporter surfaced racist and misogynistic social media posts Bell had made as a teenager in 2012 and 2013, the team reversed course. "The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments," the team said in a statement. "We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City." Bell issued an apology on Friday. The Blazers are back to square one in their search for a voice — and facing hard questions about how the posts were missed in the first place.

The timeline is what makes this story remarkable. Thursday morning, the Trail Blazers announced Bell's hiring to local fanfare. Bell, who had spent the past two years as the play-by-play announcer for the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury and was the first voice of the G League's Valley Suns when that franchise launched in 2024, was a rising name in basketball broadcasting — young, energetic, and, at 29, one of the youngest television play-by-play hires in the NBA. The Oregonian covered the hiring that morning as a fresh start for a broadcast entering a new era under new ownership. By Thursday night, the same story had to be updated with a line at the top: he had already lost the job.

What happened in between was journalism. KGW-TV reporter Devon Haskins found the posts — messages on X from 2012 and 2013, when Bell was about 15 years old — and reached out to the Trail Blazers for comment while reporting the story. The posts were, by every account that has described them, disqualifying: a December 2012 message targeting Asian people, and a series of 2012 and 2013 posts using misogynistic and degrading language about women. Hours after KGW's inquiry, the Blazers announced the firing. Bell's social media accounts were set to private by Friday morning, and on Friday, Bell issued a public apology — though by then, as USA Today noted, the damage was already done.

The team's statement did not hedge. "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," it read. "Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster." And then the part that will follow the franchise longer than the firing itself: "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."

That apology raises the question every fan asked within minutes of the news: how does an NBA franchise hire a public-facing broadcaster without finding posts that a local TV reporter found in an afternoon? The posts were not hidden. They were on an account bearing Bell's name, dating back more than a decade, discoverable by anyone who searched. The Blazers' statement effectively concedes the vetting failure — "we did not meet our own bar in this process" is about as direct as a corporate mea culpa gets. In an era when teams employ entire departments for background research, missing a public social media history is the kind of miss that invites scrutiny of the whole operation.

There is a broader context in Portland that makes the stumble sting more. The Trail Blazers are in transition. New owner Tom Dundon has spent the summer making cost-cutting moves that have drawn scrutiny — including parting ways with Calabro, who had called Blazers games since 2016 and told The Oregonian he left after receiving what he described as a "subprime" contract offer. Dundon has also insisted that only public money should fund a proposed $600 million makeover of the Moda Center, a position that has not exactly endeared him to Rip City. Into that atmosphere of skepticism walked a feel-good hire — a young broadcaster getting his NBA shot — and within eight hours it had become a national embarrassment covered by CNN, ESPN, and the Associated Press.

For Bell, the fall is as fast as any in recent sports-media memory. Two years ago he was calling Mercury games in Phoenix; this week he was supposed to start one of the most visible local broadcast jobs in basketball. Instead, posts he wrote at 15 — old enough to know better, young enough that the apology writes itself — ended the opportunity before he called a single game. His Friday apology acknowledged the posts, but apologies after exposure land differently than accountability before it, and the Blazers clearly decided the distinction mattered.

For the franchise, the work now is twofold: find a broadcaster, and fix the process. The play-by-play chair is one of the most intimate jobs in sports — the voice fans invite into their living rooms 82 nights a year, the narrator of a franchise's history as it happens. Portland's statement promised that the next hire "reflects these values," which is the right sentence. The harder part is making sure the next vetting reflects them too.

Rip City has seen its share of chaos. This one, at least, was resolved in hours rather than months. But the speed of the correction does not erase the speed of the mistake — and in Portland, where the broadcast booth has been a source of stability through years of roster turnover, the search for Kevin Calabro's successor starts over, with the whole league watching.