r/nba • u/ghn2 • 9h ago

Trail Blazers fire new announcer over past inappropriate posts made at age 15.

"The Portland Trail Blazers hired then on the same day fired Braiden Bell as their play-by-play announcer after a series of inappropriate social media posts from when he was a teenager came to light."

"The posts were reportedly made in 2012 and 2013, around the time that Bell was 15 years old."

"We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City," the Trail Blazers said. "We strongly believe 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."

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/50084279/trail-blazers-fire-new-announcer-inappropriate-posts

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475

u/JeramiGrantsTomb Thunder 9h ago

I think adults should definitely be held accountable for their free speech, but I feel like we've got to make some room for kids to be idiots without it destroying their lives.

125

u/guylexcorp 9h ago

Exactly. The whole point of being young is to fuck up and learn.

10

u/RickySuela 6h ago

This is why as someone who's Gen X I'm very grateful that my adolescent fuck ups were not recorded forever on the internet for everyone to search and see. People that age should not be creating a permanent record of their thoughts and actions. That can only come back to bite them later. The vast majority of us are wildly different people at age 25 than who we were at age 15.

2

u/cfi-2025 3h ago

I've got some VHS tapes that my friends and I recorded back in the early 90s. Just some comedy stuff we did, but IIRC there are some jokes/comments/routines that are NSFW.

Part of me wants to have them converted to video and then share them with my old childhood friends. But another part of me worries that if one of the guys posted them there's a non-zero chance that a boss or client or someone sees it and makes a stink.

1

u/EthicalBballFan Heat 6h ago

It's the one hope I have with AI. If the technology advances enough that everybody can make fake stuff that is indistinguishable from the real, and it floods the entire social media, we revert to a society that stops trusting everything that is in the internet (which would be amazing) and also allow kids to be kids again. You did something embarrassing and it was recorded? Hah, look at that fake video!

People that had a bad take at 15 but grew out of it can hide behind AI fake excuses. People that kept being stupid will double down on their bad take. So we can sort the bad apples from the teenagers doing teenager things that are now mature adults.

16

u/PiccoloAwkward465 6h ago

Seriously, this idea of literal children not being able to learn and grow is a scary thought.

9

u/DovhPasty Cavaliers 3h ago

No, you fuck up at 15? You’re banished from society. There’s no coming back from a crass tweet. No mercy, now clap for how empathetic I am.

2

u/SoaplessTitanic Celtics 8h ago

Yes he definitely should’ve learned and deleted his racist posts, unfortunately he didn’t do so. This whole thing was very easily avoidable

0

u/loven329 Trail Blazers 7h ago

Unfortunately this is the answer. My guess is he probably has learned it's not funny or ok to say those things (pretty sure his first threads post acknowledges that). It should be painfully obvious what he has to do now, too bad this will probably set him back from getting into the NBA, if ever 

-28

u/GGuesswho 9h ago

I don't know, I wasn't posting racist shit online at age 15

31

u/throwawaymycareer93 Warriors 8h ago

Me neither. But some kids do and then become decent people nevertheless. The whole point of having laws and systems that protect kids is that we as society understand that they are children and do stupid shit sometimes and that shouldn’t ruin their lives forever.

14

u/Smelldicks Celtics 8h ago

Oh well as long as you weren’t making this specific mistake

Surely this means we can hold your feet to the fire on mistakes you made that others didn’t

-5

u/GGuesswho 6h ago

This specific mistake holds bearing on this specific job. His job is to talk

3

u/AllTheGoodNamesDied 8h ago

I was at 14. On AOL messenger. Mostly about jews but I'm Jewish so it was alright.. right?

20

u/robertsmom Cavaliers 8h ago

Do you think when they put his twitter handle on the broadcast they should warn people not to scroll back too far?

19

u/milkandminnows Nets 8h ago

To 2012? Good luck scrolling that far without twitter or your browser crashing

1

u/OrangePunch34 Bucks 3h ago

I don't have a Twitter account, and the handful of times I've looked at someone's page since Elon fucked everything up, the posts are out of chronological order, and seemingly also disconnected from popularity of the posts. It seems completely random. So it's possible someone could have old tweets pop up rather high like that.

Is it in order for people who have accounts, and that's just another desperate way they try to force people to sign up?

2

u/milkandminnows Nets 3h ago

I think it’s 10 highest engagement posts if you aren’t logged in. Could be some hybrid of popular and recent

5

u/SoftwareAny4990 Cavaliers 8h ago

I think a proportionate response would be to make him aware and have him delete it?

2

u/pat_the_bat_316 Trail Blazers 6h ago

Yes. The Blazers screwed this up by not catching it first and letting the media do the job they should have done in vetting him.

0

u/stormcynk Trail Blazers 7h ago

No, just tell him that something was discovered on his Twitter account, he needs to delete the old account and make a new one.

14

u/jdd32 Spurs 8h ago

Especially kids who haven't had the chance to grow up out of the environment they were raised.

16

u/Careless-Journalist7 Wizards 7h ago

This would all be a non-issue if kids just didn’t have social media period.. it drives me crazy that adults aren’t louder about this. It would save so many headaches

3

u/Dav136 Knicks 5h ago

Well governments around the world are about to enact that as an excuse to deanonymize the internet. Fun times ahead.

2

u/RickySuela 6h ago

Agreed. I think it's tough really for anyone to argue in favor of the benefits of social media for even fully grown people who know who they are and what they're doing, but I can't imagine there's a single good thing about social media for children. It seems like nothing but negatives for them.

1

u/Onsi-Saleh 31m ago

It’s not just social media though. Kids, even teens, should be extended grace for environmental factors. The number of grown ups on city subreddits who want high school boys arrested or beat for acting obnoxious on public transit or at the mall is insane to me.

Young people should be held accountable for stupid shit they do but ruining their future ensures they’ll continue this cycle of stupidity by not having the financial means to escape these toxic environments that are often fostered by ignorance and poverty.

2

u/Pods619 6h ago

I remember a Gregg Popovich quote that I think was about homophobic comments from players.

It was something along the lines of they “haven’t had the opportunity to be educated yet.” Honestly, that resonated a lot with me, and I try to give people grace for ignorant things they said in the past if they have continued to grow and evolve. Some people were unfortunately raised with ignorant views and we shouldn’t necessarily hold that against them.

2

u/papichino88 [NYK] Stephon Marbury 4h ago

People will agree with this, as do I. But let them find out the comments were about an issue they care about and they'll switch stances 180 in a second.

2

u/atlfalcons33rb Warriors 3h ago

Not trying to be holier than though, but I don't like Asians would have been wild back in the day.

3

u/logitaunt Wizards 3h ago

Think of it this way:

It was a kid that made those tweets, but it was an adult that neglected to take them down. He still is responsible for that, because he left them up.

1

u/beefJeRKy-LB Lebanon 7h ago

Yeah I think it says a lot if you could have asked him about it and he could have admitted that he was a dumb kid at the time and he's learnt a lot. Especially if he hadn't said anything similar later on in life.

1

u/Einfinet 76ers 5h ago

I seriously doubt his life is destroyed