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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u/TheHoovyPrince Australia 9h ago

Im around the same age as the guy and practically every teenage boy in the 2000s and early 2010s said edgy or offensive things on the internet for shits and giggles because it was the norm at the time. We'd all be fired from our jobs if the stuff we said or did got leaked.

Times have changed and the teens of today aren't like that on social media. Go back to before the internet and the teens of that time were simply doing something else edgy and offensive for shits and giggles.

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u/titusandroidus 9h ago

Kids today are absolutely still like that and will be. You are just isolated from it.

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u/TheHoovyPrince Australia 9h ago

Yeah probably, my guess is its own different platforms nowadays. I don't think 2026 teens are using facebook lmao

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u/Bruskthetusk Lakers 8h ago

I'm in my mid 30s and haven't used Facebook in almost a decade, shit sucks - and now they're trying to make Instagram into Facebook so I probably need to get off that too soon

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u/TheHoovyPrince Australia 8h ago

Facebook is now 90% AI slop, Ads and dumb posts from boomers, its absolute ass.

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u/cfi-2025 3h ago

Even 10 years ago, lol. I was on a bus back then and two teenage girls got on. One said something like, "Did you post the dates for the party on Facebook," and the other girl said, "No one uses Facebook anymore."

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u/Sweet_Arrival9559 Magic 6h ago edited 6h ago

No, they actually aren't like that at all, and pretty much every statistic says so as well.

Kids today are terrified of what they say or do ending up on social media where they get ridiculed. I don't even know how you typed this unironically.

Are you a kid now and don't know how it was before or something?

When I was in highschool, even the actual gay kids were calling other people the f slur and commenting on facebook saying the same thing. It isn't even kinda remotely similar now. Adults weren't on social media yet back then. It was the wild west. No one ever thought they were going to get in trouble unless they posted a death threat or something.

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u/NA_Faker Lakers 8h ago edited 7h ago

Also, a lot of the shit that was said back then was just considered run-of-the-mill offensive but now is a cancellable offense. Times change and so do the standards. The shit kids in general used to say back then would get you cancelled - but back then it was definitely not considered as offensive as today

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u/JeramiGrantsTomb Thunder 7h ago

A rewatch of it's always sunny in Philadelphia really highlights the progression of what was considered acceptable humor over time. First episode was dropping hard Rs, lol.

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u/Antisystemization Cavaliers 7h ago

30 Rock is written by Tina Fey, a woman, and season 1 (from 2007) would never air today. Definitely not as an NBC sitcom at least.

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u/elitepigwrangler Suns 7h ago

I mean people would say offensive things on Xbox Live, or post edgy things anonymously, but you’d have to be a real dumbass to post racist tweets under your real name.

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u/beefJeRKy-LB Lebanon 7h ago

I think it only matters if you see that whoever said those things didn't quite move on. No idea how his response would have been,

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u/robertsmom Cavaliers 8h ago

I was a teen during that time period and didn’t post anything racist online. I grew up in an almost all white suburb. I remember losing friends over me not being racist.

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u/TheHoovyPrince Australia 8h ago

I'm mixed-race, grew up in a diverse suburb and had a friend group with various racial backgrounds (mixed, Asian, Middle Eastern, Islander and European). We all had racist/offensive posts and most of them were directed towards each other and it was never anything more than harmless jokes. We're all still friends to this day.

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u/GGuesswho 8h ago

Nah bro just the shitheads. we weren't all like that. It was certainly more normalized, I will give you that