LeBron James apparently thinks NFL owners and slave owners have a lot in common.

I know that would seem like an incredibly irrational thing to believe, but I’m not kidding. The best basketball player dove into the topic Friday night on his HBO show “The Shop.” (RELATED: LeBron James S igns With The Lakers)

The Los Angeles Lakers forward said the following, according to The Washington Post:

In the NFL they got a bunch of old white men owning teams and they got that slave mentality. And it’s like, ‘This is my team. You do what the f— I tell y’all to do. Or we get rid of y’all … I’m so appreciative in our league of our commissioner [Adam Silver]. He doesn’t mind us having … a real feeling and to be able to express that. It doesn’t even matter if Adam agrees with what we are saying, he at least wants to hear us out. As long as we are doing it in a very educational, non-violent way, then he’s absolutely okay with it.

I can’t believe these comments are real. When I first saw them, I thought it was a joke going around the internet. Last time I checked, slaves weren’t being handed millions of dollars to work on plantations. Slaves weren’t buying mansions with the fruits of their labors.

Slaves were oppressed, beaten, whipped and killed during times in this nation’s history. I don’t ever remember reading a story about a slave making tens of millions of dollars to play a sport. James, who is a hell of a basketball player, must be out of his mind to make these comments. It’s either that or he’s doing it because he knows it’s going to cause plenty of outrage. (RELATED: Milwaukee Bucks Star Bullies Blake Griffin With Humiliating Dunk)

There’s truly no other option.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by LeBron James (@kingjames) on Dec 15, 2018 at 6:29pm PST

Here’s another little fact for everybody who doesn’t understand the difference between the power NFL and NBA players hold.

There are less than 15 guys on an NBA roster. NFL rosters carry 53 players. That means there are plenty of options in the NFL, and the voices of individual players are diluted. The more you have of anything, the less valuable it becomes, generally speaking.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by LeBron James (@kingjames) on Nov 22, 2018 at 9:19am PST

It also seems like the 3-time champion is trying to draw a contrast on how easy it is to cut NFL players compared to NBA players. Again, the reason for this isn’t racism. It’s basic financial common sense.

NBA contracts are almost always fully guaranteed. NFL contracts almost never are fully guaranteed. Why is that? Well, the answer is actually incredibly simple.

Football is a violent sport, injuries happen all the time and players can drop off from a talent perspective relatively easy. So, if a player gets hurt or becomes an issue and he has no guaranteed money on his deal, then of course the general manager or owner can get rid of him easily. That’s not racism. That’s the business of the NFL from a financial standpoint.

If an NBA player gets hurt or is an issue and he has $50 million left on his deal, then he’s not going anywhere. Why a guy as successful as LeBron James can’t understand that is beyond me.

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