Neil Everett found out he lost his Trail Blazers job by reading about it in Forbes

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Neil Everett received neither a phone call nor an email notifying him of his own dismissal. The Trail Blazers simply excised him from their broadcast roster this week, and he absorbed the news the same way the general public did, inside a Forbes column detailing new owner Tom Dundon’s sweeping overhaul of the organization’s broadcast operation.

“I read about it in Forbes,” the former SportsCenter anchor told Front Office Sports.

Everett’s dismissal is the latest casualty of Dundon’s staggering $4.25 billion acquisition of the Trail Blazers, a purchase that arrived alongside an immediate, aggressive campaign of cost-cutting across the entire organization. This week’s broadcast purge claimed longtime television analyst Michael Holton, a fixture of Blazers coverage for nearly two decades, alongside statistician Tom Haberstroh and fellow host Jamie Hudson, in addition to Everett himself.

Everett’s tenure in Portland was, in truth, a second act, one that followed a considerably longer and more celebrated run at ESPN. He joined the network in 2000 after spending more than a decade cutting his teeth in Hawaii local news, established himself as one of ESPN’s most beloved and instantly recognizable personalities, prized for his effortless wit, his signature “Bartender, Jack” home run call, and an “Aloha” sign-off that became a trademark unto itself.

Beginning in 2009, he anchored the late-night, West Coast edition of SportsCenter alongside Stan Verrett, forging a partnership widely remembered as one of the show’s defining duos.

Everett had already anticipated his own demise at the Worldwide Leader, reading the shifting winds inside Bristol long before the network made anything official. He’d already consented to a diminished workload and considerably reduced compensation in his final contract there, and he later confided to Richard Deitsch that he’d “known the writing was on the wall” well before his 2023 exit, which is why he’d already begun cultivating an alternative foothold with the Trail Blazers as a studio host back in 2021. By March 2023, a full three months before ESPN’s decision became official, he was already hosting a pair of Blazers “LegendCasts,” alongside former players Antonio Harvey and Terry Porter.

That June, his 14-year collaboration with Verrett finally dissolved amid Disney’s sweeping company-wide cost reductions. He and Verrett later reunited for a Twitch show together once Verrett’s own ESPN tenure concluded in 2025 with the closure of the network’s Los Angeles studio, the same studio that had once housed their nightly partnership.

Now, Everett is figuring out life after ESPN for the second time, minus the years of warning he had the first time around.

The post Neil Everett found out he lost his Trail Blazers job by reading about it in Forbes appeared first on Awful Announcing.

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