The Portland Trail Blazers will open their 2026-27 pre-season Wednesday night at the Moda Center in downtown “Rip City” against the Golden State Warriors. That much is certain. Beyond that, not much is –and that lengthy list of ifs grew by one last Thursday when THE ASSOCIATED PRESS elevated what began earlier in the day as a purely local story into one that warranted national attention by the next morning, as evidenced by this work of THE BIG LEAD’s Ankit Kumar:
NBA team Portland Trail Blazers fired Braiden Bell hours after announcing him as their new television play-by-play broadcaster. The decision came after racist and misogynistic posts Bell made as a teenager surfaced online. KGW reporter Devon Haskins identified the posts while preparing a report. The tweets remained on Bell’s active X account Thursday evening. The posts included offensive comments targeting Asian people and derogatory remarks about women. KGW’s review did not find offensive tweets from Bell after he became an adult.
The team announced Bell’s dismissal in a statement posted on X. The 29-year-old Bell served as the TV play-by-play announcer of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury. “The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments,” the statement read. “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.”
Kinda ironic that something that effectively trashes Bell’s career was released on social media. I get that Portland is a very sensitive city to these sorts of things. Anyone who ever watched the brilliant IFC series PORTLANDIA knows what I mean. In my case, I’ve spent substantial time there, most recently when I had tickets to a regular season game at Moda early in the 2021-22 season when the rest of the league had significantly loosened the prior season’s strict guidelines about proof of vaccination. The folks hosting me weren’t quite as diligent as the city felt they should have been and were denied entrance to the arena by armed security. I ate the cost of them out of solidarity. So I do get what the Blazers believe they are dealing with more than many.
But the fact that such draconian standards were put in place by an organization with enough of a history of tolerance for actual misbehavior of adults that they were once nicknamed the “Jail Blazers”–and specifically from the management team that took it over earlier this year that has substantially added to the list of missteps this franchise has seen as it prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their sole NBA championship season–makes this all the more exemplary of how duplicitous those standards were in this case.
A little context if you will allow. The sole reason that someone like Bell was even hired in the first place was the end result of this move that Kumar later referenced:
Bell had been hired to replace Kevin Calabro, who served as Portland’s television voice since 2016. Calabro departed after the team offered him what he described as a “subprime” contract.
Calabro had been a mainstay in the Pacific Northwest for years prior as an announcer for the late and lamented Seattle Supersonics. Many of Seattle and Portland’s media companies–including the one that owns KGW–are intertwined, as are the fan bases. So this wasn’t just some economy of scale move–this was a cultural shift perpetrated by the Blazers’ new carpetbagging owner. As were others that marred the Trail Blazers’ first post-season appearance in five years last spring that HOOPS RUMORS’ Arthur Hill addressed at the time:
Tom Dundon‘s penny-pinching reputation since taking over as owner of the Trail Blazers continues to grow. Sean Highkin of Rose Garden Report states in a subscriber-only story that Portland didn’t bring two-way players Caleb Love, Chris Youngblood and Jayson Kent to San Antonio for the first two games of its first-round playoff series.
Players on two-way contracts aren’t eligible to appear in the postseason, but it’s common practice to have them accompany their teams on road trips. Highkin checked with sources from the other seven teams that were on the road this weekend and confirmed that they all brought their two-way players, even though they were in street clothes. Highkin describes the Blazers’ decision as “well outside of standard practice” for NBA teams.
That action was then followed by a summer of layoffs of long-tenured behind-the-scenes personnel in a manner akin to how Dundon gutted the NHL’s Carolina Panthers’ operations when he took that franchise over. That team just won the Stanley Cup, so his gravitas with the league is still remarkably high. But then he turned around and invested the better part of those cost savings and then some in the one significant off-season move the team made player-wise, trading for the talented but troubled Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies. At the peak of his young career during a surprising 2022 post-season run Morant sold more jerseys than all but three other NBA players. But then he developed a penchant for trouble as our friend Copilot compiled:
On June 16, 2023, the NBA suspended Morant for 25 games without pay for “conduct detrimental to the league” after a video on social media showed him brandishing a firearm while intoxicated at a Denver‑area club This was the second such incident in three months; in March 2023, he was suspended 8 games for a similar act. Commissioner Adam Silver said the behavior was “reckless and irresponsible” and could inspire others to emulate it Morant was barred from all public league/team activities, including preseason, and had to complete a league‑approved program before returning The suspension cost him about $7.5 million in salary. Morant publicly apologized to the NBA, Grizzlies, teammates, sponsors, and fans, citing mental health and decision‑making issue.
On Nov 1, 2025, the Memphis Grizzlies suspended Morant for one game for “conduct detrimental to the team” The incident followed a postgame exchange with coach Tuomas Iisalo after a loss to the Lakers, where Iisalo challenged Morant’s leadership and effort, and Morant responded in a tone the team deemed inappropriate. Morant also showed disengagement in the game, muttering “Go ask the coaching staff” in media availability.
Morant did apologize once–just as Bell quickly did on Friday. But I guess lacking a jump shot his sort of mattered less to Dundon and company.
Not so much for the fans they were supposedly looking out for. And our hard-working friend Matthew Keys authored yet another followup late Friday night that indicates this story isn’t dying the quick natural death that was the apparent intention:
TEGNA has launched an internal review into a news story published by its Portland, Oregon station on Thursday that led to the firing of a young sports broadcaster, The Desk has learned.
The investigation focuses on whether KGW-TV (Channel 8, NBC) and its two journalists, news director John Tierney and sports reporter Devon Haskins, follow the company’s editorial processes with respect to researching and reporting a story involving social media posts made by former WNBA sports broadcaster Braiden Bell. Haskins and Tierney have not commented on the matter. A spokesperson for TEGNA has not yet returned an after-hours e-mail seeking comment on the company’s investigation.
In a follow-up story on Friday, KGW-TV said its original report “stoked an ongoing conversation as to whether individuals — public figures and otherwise — should face consequences years later for things they said online and might have since come to regret.” The station didn’t mention that most of the public’s criticism was directed at its two journalists, and not at Bell, and that most of the discussion centered on whether it was appropriate for the station to dig through social media posts a person made when they were underage.
“Looking up old tweets when someone was 15 and reporting on them like it’s breaking news is journalistically indefensible,” Clay Travis, the founder of OutKick who sold his website to Fox News Media, wrote in a tweet on Friday.
A knowledgeable source at TEGNA admitted KGW-TV looked into Bell’s “publicly-available” social media posts while conducing background research on him, and said the station likely would have withheld the story for publication in order to give Bell ample time to account for his past comments.
But things changed after the Trail Blazers publicly announced Bell’s firing. The station was unwilling to wait out the possibility that another news outlet might publish the reason for the firing first, so they elected to run their own story three hours before their regular newscast.
The rush to publish after the firing was announced made it clear that KGW-TV’s motivations were competitive, not journalistic, in nature. The likelihood that someone would have connected Bell’s firing to his prior social media posts was high, and the station did not want to be “scooped” on a story that it had been working on already.
One source at KGW-TV, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and feared repercussions for doing so, said Tierney initially defended the story in conversations with other newsroom staffers.
“He acted like it was a huge breaking news story, and you could tell he was pretty proud of it, like it was going to earn him an Emmy or something,” the source in a phone call on Friday.
On Friday, amid intense public backlash, “it became clear that the newsroom was split on whether (Tierney and Haskins) handled things the best way.” “It comes across as creepy to look through someone’s tweets when they were 15, and it’s hard to defend the story when there’s literally no other evidence that (Bell) did anything else racist or wrong or whatever,” the source affirmed.
For as supposedly true blue as the perception of Portland is the media landscape is now dominated by anything but left-leaning companies. TEGNA, of course, is in a holding pattern as a de facto adjunct by its controversial benemoth buyer Nexstar, which already owns the market’s CBS station KOIN. David Smith’s Sinclair owns the ABC affiliate KATU, while FOX itself owns KPTV. The fact someone like Travis has chosen to weigh in only underscores this as an ideogical battle in some minds.
But according to OREGONLAWS.com, there’s only so much weight any offense committed by a minor carries once the person becomes an adult:
An adult in Oregon is affected by a juvenile offense only if that offense would be a felony under current Oregon law. In those cases, the juvenile record can be treated as a felony in the adult’s criminal history, influencing sentencing. If it would not be a felony, it is usually excluded from adult sentencing calculations…If the juvenile offense would not have been a felony under current Oregon law, it generally will not be counted in the adult’s criminal history for sentencing purposes.
Can anyone objectively claim that a regretted tweet at age 16 carry more weight with an employer or the court of opinion than brandishing a gun at age 23?
Oh by the by…KGW just happens to be renewing a long-dormant relationship as the Blazers’ home TV stations in the wake of the continued demise of regional sports networks. Think someone like Haskins–self-described as Husband, dad, 2x Emmy winning storyteller on his MUCK RACK.com profile–a working journalist since Bell was in kindergarten and a Pacific Northwest native himself–might have felt he deserved a crack at the gig that went to a Gen Z-adjacent from the freaking W?
No, that doesn’t happen. Portland’s far too utopian and nice an environment for that.
I’ll admit I’m still a tad jaundiced based upon my personal experience. It’s not like it’s every day I had the resources to travel and afford an NBA game–especially in Portland where I actually know people I like. Not gonna happen any time soon either, I fear. And considering Dundon has spent a good deal of the summer lobbying for and trying to shake down the city for significant upgrades to the somewhat outdated Moda Center who knows if they might not be on their way out of town–especially since the league has already committed a new franchise to Seattle.
It’s a complicated story at bare minimum. I’d love to see someone qualified and even-handed to tackle it. Hmmm…how about Braiden Bell? Move the moral compass if you can. And let it be an audition for your next and hopefully longer-lasting gig.
Until next time…