The victim is broadcaster Braiden Bell, who was the Portland Trail Blazers play-by-play announcer for less than 12 hours before the team fired him Thursday for tweets he posted in 2012 and 2013… when he was 15 years old.The coward is the Blazers, who were informed of said tweets and ousted Bell immediately, presumably out of fear of the ever-ravenous outrage mob.NBA'S PORTLAND TRAIL BLAZERS HIRE ANNOUNCER, THEN FIRE HIM HOURS LATER OVER TWEETS FROM HIS TEENAGE YEARSAn overhead close-up view of the NBA Cup logo painted on the court during a game between the Sacramento Kings and Portland Trail Blazers at the Moda Center in Portland, Ore., on Nov.29, 2024.
(Getty Images)And then there's the villain: KGW in Portland, the TV station that dug up those tweets and used them to try and ruin a man's life.Let's start with the ugly part — the tweets themselves.They are certainly nothing to condone, and are the kind of posts that should have given any of Bell's teenage friends pause at the time.The first was from November 2012, when Bell wrote, "Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w----s #BigUps."The next was less than a month later, when Bell tweeted, "I'm not racist at all...But not gonna lie...Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest"The third was from February 2013, when Bell tweeted, "We got a sl-t alert on aisle 10." And the final tweet KGW reported came less than two weeks later, when Bell typed "Girls these nights...Smh #ThirstyForTheD."Again, these are a long way from pleasant.
And if Bell was shamed by peers for his words at the time, it would have been justified.But I think most of us who saw this story were thankful that our stupidest or most offensive comments as adolescents weren't broadcast to the world.
As Jason Whitlock said on X: "Virtually everything that came out of my mouth at 15 was a fireable offense.Amazing, sad story."Damian Lillard of the Milwaukee Bucks dribbles on the Portland Trail Blazers center court logo d...