Braiden Bell should be allowed to call play-by-play for the Portland Trail Blazers. The 29-year-old broadcaster was fired hours after being hired when a local news station uncovered racist and sexist tweets he posted when he was 15 years old. Yes, an aspiring broadcaster was fired for something he did 14 years ago as a minor.
The conversation has mainly focused on whether the punishment fits the crime, which, by the way, isn’t a crime at all. Anyone can tweet whatever they wish. It’s a free country, and there’s free speech, but people have come to understand the consequences that can come with what they post.
The focus should be more on the Portland Trail Blazers and the double standard in their hiring process. If tracing social media isn’t a priority when you make a hire, why does social media from before you hire become an issue that warrants firing someone afterwards?
That’s the part of this entire formula I don’t understand.
Think Before Hitting Send
The Portland Trail Blazers are not Brick Oven Pizzeria & Ristorante. As much as I love the establishment for its solid pie and ice-cold drinks, it’s not a multibillion-dollar NBA franchise. The standards for a role with an NBA franchise should be slightly higher than those for a line cook at a pizzeria. Therefore, there are added layers of data that every team must investigate prior to making a hire.
Without a doubt, social media presents a problem for employers looking to hire the best people and put them in positions to succeed. It’s free, easy to access and designed to keep people engaged through algorithms that encourage users to continue posting and interacting. In 2012, Twitter had more than 200 million monthly users, with particularly high usage among young adults.
Bell wasn’t the first 15-year-old to say something controversial, racist or sexist on social media. He also won’t be the last. That isn’t an excuse for what he shared. What he posted was wrong and insensitive.
But did those same tweets hold Bell back from roles with Blaze Radio 1330 AM in Phoenix in 2017? What about his short stint as a broadcaster with the Pac-12 Network? Or his five years calling games for California Baptist University. Which led him to earn opportunities with Arizona State, the Valley Suns and the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury?
It’s obvious that none of those employers took issue with the tweets of a 15-year-old boy. Yet, Bell continued to climb the professional ladder.
Did all those organizations look into his social media background? Likely not.
Did the Portland Trail Blazers look into it? Obviously, they didn’t.
The announcement was made. Social media posts went out, accompanied by a nicely written press release. It was a moment for Bell that had been a long time coming for an aspiring broadcaster. Then, the Trail Blazers played moral police. After someone else did the job they should have done during the hiring process.
A Double Standard
The Portland Trail Blazers can’t have it both ways. No employer should.
You can’t identify, recruit, interview, hire and announce someone as the new voice of your franchise, then fire that person when a hole in your hiring process is exposed. You can’t say something was in clear violation of your team and league policies when you didn’t do the legwork during the hiring process itself.
Yes, the Trail Blazers acknowledged that they failed to meet their own standards during the hiring process. But you can’t simply say you’ll do better when you already had policies in place that were supposed to prevent this PR nightmare in the first place.
That’s why Bell should remain the new voice of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Bell made a mistake when he was 15 years old. He has acknowledged it, apologized for it and spent the past 14 years demonstrating that those tweets do not define the broadcaster he became.
The Trail Blazers, meanwhile, made a mistake at 29. They identified Bell as the right person for the job. They recruited him, interviewed him, hired him and announced him as the new voice of the franchise. Then they discovered something they should have known before making the announcement and decided Bell should pay the price for their failure to do their homework.
That isn’t accountability. That’s passing the buck.
Ring The Bell
If the Trail Blazers truly believe Bell has demonstrated that he is unfit to represent the organization, then they should be prepared to explain why the same evidence wasn’t enough to prevent them from hiring him in the first place.
If the tweets were disqualifying when they were discovered, they should have been disqualifying during the hiring process. Instead, Bell lost the opportunity of a lifetime while the organization gets to move forward after admitting it failed to meet its own standards.
That’s backwards.
The Trail Blazers can still make this right. They can acknowledge their own failure in the hiring process and give Bell the opportunity they already determined he was qualified to receive. If Portland wants to demonstrate that accountability actually means something, it should start by holding itself accountable.
Put Bell back in the chair. Let him call the games. Let his work, his professionalism and the broadcaster he has become determine whether he deserves to be the voice of the Portland Trail Blazers.
Fourteen years ago, Bell made a mistake. Portland has a chance to make sure it doesn’t make another one.
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