The Portland Trail Blazers experienced a terribly public gaffe yesterday, as they hired and then fired television play-by-play broadcaster Braiden Bell within eight hours. This was not quite firing General Manager Kevin Pritchard the night of the 2010 NBA Draft and then letting him conduct it, but it was still a pretty major black eye for the franchise.
The uproar following the incident was significant. It rippled through to the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag and one frustrated reader who has this to ask.
Dave,
Why do the Blazers keep [word redacted]-ing up like this? Bad drafts. Bad hires. Bad coaches. Bad PR. Bad negotiating tactics. Are we the joke of the NBA at this point? Name me a worse organization! Why are we specially chosen to be miserable [word redacted again] ups? I swear, one more time and I’m out.
Frustrated and Tired
Nah. You can travel a thousand or so miles south and find a Clippers franchise in much worse shape right now. Don’t worry. Spending five draft picks on Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, then losing five more in penalties because of the salary cap shenanigans will eclipse anything the Blazers have done.
So look…we’re mixing up multiple topics and eras into one general ball of frustration. I get it. That’s what human beings do when anger doesn’t get resolved and then a new stimulus comes up. The new incident opens up the storage bin on all the old anger, which then channels right through the current situation. That’s fair, too! I’m not even going to argue with it. You never get to fully address beefs with corporations or sports franchises. They either pass on like it didn’t happen or they offer a, “Sorry!” and expect the matter to be resolved. Frustration snowballs under these conditions. It’s understandable.
At the same time, step back and think. What if you were to bundle everything your [pick one] spouse/partner, child, or parent ever did wrong into one lump and then examine it? First, the stack would be pretty big. Second, you’d pretty much start to hate them and view everything they did in a negative light. But that’s not how relationships are supposed to work. Our history together spools out over time and space. Each event is discreet, with context. Does it relate to other events? Sure, especially when there’s a pattern. Is it interchangeable with them? Not really. It’s not supposed to be glommed into one, indistinguishable ball of un-addressable rage.
If we want to consider Blazers draft history, we might be able to make a claim that Portland has trouble identifying and selecting young talent. We’d still have to account for different eras and different people making decisions. GM’s don’t become stupid just because they get hired in Portland. But maybe you could draw a correlating line through the topic if you tried hard enough. But it’s not really fair to group draft history with arena negotiations and coaching hires and ticket prices. They’re completely different issues unfolding in different parts of the organization at different times under different people. One doesn’t really relate to another, other than they probably have the common bond of pissing us off. They only way we can group them logically is to center ourselves. That’s probably not a fair lens through which to evaluate a franchise.
Here is an under-discussed aspect of doing all these things: Running an NBA franchise is hard. It’s easy to look back at drafting in hindsight. In reality, I wouldn’t have come close to getting all of Portland’s draft picks right. Neither would you. That’s not to excuse obvious mistakes. Rather an affirmation that, over time, we’re all going to have errors to our credit when we try to do something difficult. Similarly, I would not have caught Braiden Bell’s past social media history. I’ve hired lots of people for lots of things. Not once have I dug back 13 years into their X account to see what they said. Maybe I should have! It could be a lesson learned. All I know is, if I were sitting in that hiring seat in the Trail Blazers office, I probably would have done the exact same thing and been just as blindsided today.
Again, that’s not meant to excuse or justify the mistake. It’s a confession that if I had been in charge of that hiring process, I’d be doing today exactly what the Blazers have done: admitting it was a mistake and apologizing. I can get frustrated with the Blazers for the error, sure! That’s completely valid. But I can’t get mad at them for being totally ignorant and incompetent without also admitting that I, too, would have been ignorant and incompetent in just that way.
There’s a bigger issue here, though. All of the frustration, outcry, and retroactive redress doesn’t really solve the problem. Absent a time machine, we can’t go back 13 years and tell a kid not to say offensive and harmful things. Even if we could, it would be throwing a bucket of water back at an ocean wave.
The real issues go far beyond this incident. Racism and misogyny can’t be solved through Bell, the hiring process, or the Blazers franchise in 2026. We can’t address the big issues adequately, so we channel all the force of that wave into the space and time that we can reach, leading to a nuclear explosion channeled through a drinking straw. This is also very human. But it’s also futile.
If we want to do anything beyond that here, we’ve got to untangle that knot and address things for what they are. We need to look at what actually happened instead of just our frustrated responses to those events.
Here’s what I know. 13 years ago, a kid with an avenue to address the world chose to use hurtful, stereotypical language to do so. He may have done so out of personal choice, because he was an ass. He almost certainly did so because somewhere he absorbed the idea that those words were funny or powerful or popular. It’s also extremely likely that he felt empowered to do so because, like many people who grow up in an empowered, normalized group, he knew there would be little or no repercussions for his words. He was free to make mistakes that more vulnerable people couldn’t. He could say those words and laugh, or receive cheers, or just pass onward without anything major happening. We can surmise this from the simple fact that they didn’t stick with him at all. 13 years later he didn’t remember them or think that saying them was a consequential enough event to delete from the same public feed he still used to address the world. Those words didn’t matter to him. They didn’t represent him, in his own view. They were just something dumb and inconsequential he said as a kid.
That kid didn’t grow up alone, though. There were people of different ethnicities around him, otherwise how would he know to speak of them? There were also definitely women and girls in his orbit. They heard those words too. They experienced them, not just in his tweets, but over and over again through utterances just like this and in the community’s acceptance/dismissal of same. The guy who wrote the sentences could forget them and pass onward, claiming they weren’t part of his reality or identity. The people described in those tweets didn’t have that luxury, because they couldn’t shed the identity of being in a certain ethnic group or a certain gender. Nor could they escape the descriptions being appended to those identities. They had to, and still have to, live with those things long after the person who wrote them left them behind.
I feel bad for Mr. Bell, but I feel worse for the people his words described. He can get another job of some sort. They can’t get another life. Nor can they escape this kind of crap in this one.
And make no mistake, this kind of thing is still going on today. Literally right now, this week, an improv teacher in a local high school where I live was teaching kids how to do gibberish on stage. He taught them to do “nonsense” words for different parts of the world and different ethnicities. And yep…he used those words for locales of Asian origin and others I can’t repeat for African peoples without missing a beat or blinking. Students in my orbit were talking about it live, same-day. He literally taught them to use phrases that (rightfully) would immediately get them canceled should they ever be uttered on stage. He can do that for the same reason Mr. Bell sent those tweets back in 2012 and 2013: no consequences at all. Some people might be aghast, but the people in his circle will just laugh and pat him on the back, or pass it off like nothing significant happened.
This is not just something that happened 13 years ago, a dumb thing done by a teenager that should just be excused and ignored. It had effects then. It continues to have effects now. It needs to be addressed. The consequences Mr. Bell suffered are justified. They were long owed. They were just late in coming.
The hard part is, this does not even begin to address or solve the matter. That’s the thing we all need to think about and live with. You can’t address an NBA team’s systemic drafting problem by getting one draft modestly right and claiming it’s fixed. You have to change the roots of the process. Neither can you address systemic racism or misogyny issues by punishing one, miserable dude who got the promotion of his life and had his career ripped away in the same day.
What happened to Braiden Bell isn’t the center of the story because he was never supposed to be the center of the story. We have watched the Blazers dismiss him. That doesn’t mean we’ve re-centralized anything, or anyone, that matters.
If we want to do anything meaningful here, we have to affirm among ourselves (and teach all our 15-year-old children) that saying horrible things about other people isn’t funny, empowering, or cool…not because they might face consequences someday, but because those people are people. We have to advocate for respect and care for other human beings, period. We have to stop accepting, justifying, or excusing things that hurt others. We have to regard people of different ethnicities as people. We have to regard women as people. And then we have to reshape our words, actions, political decisions, economic rewards, and all of our interactions accordingly.
Understanding this, we begin to see that the Blazers can’t get it right in this matter, at least not by themselves. They might have been able to get it right in this case if we had all changed the world before Mr. Bell ever thought it was a good idea to post those tweets. They might have been able to get it right if he had gotten immediate negative feedback that his words were misplaced, unacceptable, and just plain wrong. (At least he would have deleted them then.) They might have been able to get it right if our world were more equal instead of empowering some over and against their neighbors, making caustic words stick to certain people while they slide right off of others. But none of that is true right now. No matter what they do or say, the Blazers can’t get it right here. We all have to get it right—or at least righter—together. No amount of blame or dismissal will change that fact, or our responsibility for remembering it.
That starts by appropriately saying that these words can’t be spoken among us, or even associated with us, in any public way. But it doesn’t end there. Whatever we do from here needs to be more than digging deeper into social media feeds. Whether our interest is in stopping injustice or stopping people from having to experience consequences for saying dumb things when they were young, the approach is the same: change the environment in which these things incubate and they’ll either die out or become so obvious when they happen that the repercussions will stop the issue at the source.
It may not have been much, but at least the Blazers said they weren’t going to put up with this stuff or be represented by it. No matter the motive, that was a start. I wish the whole thing hadn’t happened. But seeing as it went down like it did, maybe they weren’t entirely [word redacted]-ing up here. Maybe the whole situation is [word-redacted]-ed up already. This doesn’t just reveal how icky one guy is, or certain words are, or one team’s hiring process was. It reveals how we didn’t—and often don’t—know the difference between destructive and healthy…that we treat both as if they were the same That’s the part that needs to change if we’re ever going to make this better.
Bell did what he did. The Blazers responded like they responded. Those are givens. If that’s where it ends, the best we can do is store it in the Big Box of Angry, to leap out like a twisted Jack-in-the-Box the next time something bad happens. Or we could stop looking backwards at this like it was an isolated, historical incident and start looking forward to how we actually make this better. I don’t know entirely how that happens, but I know it starts by saying, “This ain’t it. We’re not doing this, or speaking this way, anymore.” Then we get down to the harder work: what takes its place?
There must be some future in which powerful, cool, and funny don’t revolve around insulting other people because of their ethnicity, orientation, gender, or any other inherent quality. Once we figure out that future better—once we can affirm it to each other and teach it to our children—we won’t have to worry so much when we make a joke. More importantly, we might finally stop being one.
Either way, that’s not just on the Blazers. That’s on all of us.
