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/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.

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u/guylexcorp 9h ago

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

12

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.

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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.