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Did Netflix just do us dirty? Everybody gets a second look in the new documentary Untold: Jail Blazers, but nobody comes off looking worse than the city of Portland itself. (Well, maybe Ruben Patterson.)
The streamer landed interviews with former Trail Blazers Rasheed Wallace, Bonzi Wells, Damon Stoudamire and general manager Bob Whitsitt, who told their sides of the story of the 1997-2005 NBA team famously stacked with guys who ranged from hotheads to straight-up criminals. The documentary was released April 14 as the latest installment in Netflix’s sports film series.
Portland of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s is portrayed as a racist backwater, to such an extent that the filmmakers use an extended shot of a train passing an actual backwater to show what it looks like here. Bonzi Wells describes his confusion on draft day that he might be playing in Portland, Maine. ‘Sheed calls it “a culture shock.”
But when ex-Blazer and Wilson High School graduate Damon Stoudamire describes getting pulled over three times in one day by the Lake Oswego police and then being subject to an illegal home search there, well, it’s clear that Netflix is standing on firm ground in its depiction of Jail Blazers-era Portlandia. It makes the blood boil. Untold: Jail Blazers might have some shortcomings, but it is a tough but necessary watch for anyone who lived through the era.
Nothing in the hour-long doc will be revelatory to fans who paid even half-attention to the Trail Blazers during that time—and in fact, the reality was even more extreme than depicted in the film (“Netflix and No Chill,” WW, April 15, 2026). Stuff that didn’t make the cut: Wallace’s seven-game suspension in 2003 for allegedly charging referee Tim Donaghy on the Rose Garden’s loading dock. Zach Randolph hiding out at a teammate’s house for two days in 2003, afraid that Patterson would shoot him. Anything about J.R. Rider.
The filmmakers mostly make good use of their impressive access to the players and management. They hold Whitsitt’s feet to the fire for his decisions, especially for signing Patterson, famously the first registered sex offender to ever suit up in an NBA jersey. And even if fans don’t like Whitsitt’s answers, he takes some accountability and doesn’t walk out of the interview. That’s something. They also catch him in either a lie or a memory lapse, as he says Patterson “did not act up at all when he was in Portland,” minutes before playing the 911 call from 2002 of his wife saying he had just choked her. (Patterson would have faced felony domestic abuse charges but his wife asked prosecutors to drop the case.)
Rasheed Wallace is the comic relief of the film—I’d watch him do impressions of the team bus driving in slow-mo any day—but Bonzi Wells is its beating heart.
Untold: Jail Blazers finds some resolution to the Jail Blazers era via a December 2025 Rip City Reunion event at Moda Center, where Wells, Stoudamire and others were honored at halftime. In the lead up to the game, the documentarians film Wells and Stoudamire in a hotel room talking about clearly painful memories from their time on the team. Stoudamire says he’s getting older and feeling nostalgic. Wells looks out at the Willamette River and talks about how strange it feels to be a visitor in the Rose City now.
“I never left home in my life before I went to Portland, Oregon,” Wells says. “That’s 2,500 miles away from Indiana. I turned into a man out there, and then they gave up on me. And that hurt me more than anything.”
Stoudamire tells him that he came to the Rip City Reunion to support Bonzi, who was only 22 when he joined the Blazers.
“Let me go and move forward,” Wells says.
You and Portland both, Bonzi.
