Of all the players in NBA history who have played exactly three total minutes, none have been talked about more than Royce White.

After being selected in the first round of the 2012 NBA Draft, White started a national conversation on mental health in sports by publicly disclosing his struggle with anxiety and fear of flying. He advocated for the NBA to install a mental health policy, refusing to play until it did so. The end result was what he sees as a de facto banishment from the league.

“No one will deny this – it’s not hard to get blackballed from the NBA,” White told The Post. “For any number of things.”

The NBA, which declined to comment for this story on White’s claims, has come to embrace the mental health conversation in recent years. They’ve enhanced initiatives and publicly supported other players, such as Kevin Love and DeMar DeRozan, who spoke about their struggles. But White remains out of the NBA, bouncing among other leagues in the years since. Most recently, he joined the Ice Cube-founded Big3, where he was the first overall pick of the 2019 draft.

Seven years later, the outspoken White remains a staunch activist for mental health awareness. Equally staunch is his anger at the NBA – the league that he says left him behind – and his skepticism in its true intentions in now publicly embracing the activism he once championed.

“The NBA has kept me out because the mental health conversation forced them to look in the mirror, and none of them want to,” he said. “And they don’t want to because they built an entire industry on fallacies and smoke and mirrors and circle jerks.”

The Big3 has mostly functioned as a retirement showcase for NBA has-beens throughout its three-year existence. Thirty- and forty-something versions of Gilbert Arenas, Jason Terry and Brian Scalabrine captain the 3-on-3 teams, and guys like Amar’e Stoudemire, Greg Oden and Nate Robinson round out the rosters.

White breaks the mold for a Big3 player. He is not a former superstar in his twilight years, hoping to enthrall fans with some dunks while his knees still work. At 28 years old, White is theoretically in the prime of his basketball career, and believes he would be thriving in the NBA had things transpired differently.

A once-tantalizing prospect, the 6-foot-8 forward drew comparisons to Charles Barkley and Magic Johnson during his lone season at Iowa State. He led his team in all five major statistical categories, and his playmaking ability was “off the charts,” according to then-coach Fred Hoiberg.

But his struggle with anxiety and panic attacks — combined with his perceived insistence on talking about it, both in the press and through social media — made him an enigma. The NBA had seen countless players come out of the draft with physical ailments, but arguably never one with a mental illness so publicly disclosed.

Immediately after the Houston Rockets drafted him, he learned the NBA had no written policy around mental health — and he took issue with that.

“You have a drug abuse policy for players,” White said. “You have a list of banned substances — one of which, by the way, is benzodiazepines, which is one of the most prescribed drugs in America for anxiety. So you’re actually creating a boogie-man narrative around mental health.

“Here I am, with anxiety, at 21 years old, and I’m having trouble seeing how I will be able to navigate this industry if there is a true ignorance around the mental health topic. And there was a true ignorance around it that has been admitted now and confirmed by the NBA.”

Unwavering in his refusal to play if the league didn’t write a policy (which he says would not have been hard), White missed training camp and multiple practices – then was sent to the D-League. He says he asked the Rockets to see an independent doctor, and they refused to let him do so. Instead, they hired their own psychiatrist, and said they would fine White if he didn’t see the psychiatrist every day.

White says the Rockets were not happy with his brash style of advocacy — allegedly threatening him if he continued to speak negatively about the league, and team, that employed him.

“They literally told me, ‘Listen, you’re right about mental health,’” White said. “’But if you don’t play, if you don’t play well, and if you don’t listen to us, no one is going to listen to you. We can control that. We have the platform, and without it you’re a nobody.’”

The Rockets front office did not return multiple requests for comment.

Opinions on White fluctuated wildly. Some commended his advocacy, believing he was brave for seemingly sacrificing his career for what he believed in. But others felt he was going about it the wrong way, refusing to play ball and trying to rewrite the rules in his favor. In a column for Yahoo! Sports, Adrian Wojnarowski argued that White was too inexperienced and “wasn’t good enough” as a player to position himself as such an outspoken advocate, urging him to cut it out before he lost his job.

White’s fear of flying seemed to be a sticking point in the media. The Rockets reportedly offered him access to a bus in which he could travel to games instead of via airplane. When he still didn’t play, some assumed he was just looking for excuses, blowing off his contractual obligation despite getting what he wanted.

But seven years later, White insists that the flights were never an issue. He says he really just wanted the NBA to write a policy and embrace the conversation on an issue that affects one in five Americans.

“It took me six years to drive that point home. I’ve always flown. I flew when I got to the NBA. I flew to the NBA. I flew to Houston, I flew to Summer League, I flew to Philly, I flew to Sacramento,” White said.

“This whole flying narrative is a complete hoax. It was an easy scapegoat.”

In the offseason, he was traded to the 76ers, then cut. He signed with the Kings, playing in three games for a total of three garbage-time minutes. By March 2014, he was out of the league.

The Big3 is not White’s first post-NBA stop in pro basketball. In 2016, he signed with the London Lightning of the NBL Canada, the country’s top professional basketball league. That season, he was named the league MVP and led his team to the championship. The year after, he led the league in scoring.

But he hasn’t managed to escape controversy, despite his success. In his last NBLC season in 2018, he received an 11-game suspension for a heated sideline confrontation with league deputy commissioner Audley Stephenson. The incident took place during a playoff game and effectively ended his tenure with the Lightning.

Earlier this year, White said he was training to become an MMA fighter. In his first Big3 game, White was ejected minutes into the action for fighting with former Atlanta Hawks star Josh Smith (including that abbreviated stint, White is averaging 6 points, 6 rebounds and 4.3 assists through three games).

There’s no denying White is a big personality with a penchant for confrontation. Those who don’t understand his condition might see an outspoken, seemingly over-confident young man at odds with their idea of what anxiety looks like. But that’s the perception White wants to change — he believes many people are wildly misinformed about mental health.

“People talk a lot about suicide, depression, eating disorders, but there’s a whole road before you get to crisis,” White said. “And the accountability of that road is what the NBA doesn’t want any part of, and what people don’t understand.

“They’ll say if you’re suicidal, call this line. No, no, no, how about talking about how people detach themselves from the reality of their daily lives. Mixed with alcohol, those are the types of things that catalyze suicide.”

White believes the NBA isn’t fully willing to embrace this aspect of the conversation because it would hurt its bottom line.

“Take alcohol as the prime example,” White said. “The relationship between professional sport and alcohol puts them on the opposite side of the mental health conversation from an advocate like me. They sell billions and billions of dollars of beer, alcohol, whatever, and that’s a primary part of the business model. But there’s no moral ethical observation of alcohol limit. Only a practical one.

“Some of [the NBA’s] biggest partners are in the alcohol industry. You don’t even want to touch that with an oven mitt.” (Two of the NBA’s top sponsorship partners are indeed Anheuser-Busch and Brown-Forman, but ESPN, Turner, State Farm, Pepsi, Nike and 2K Sports, among others, have bigger deals, according to league officials.)

Even if the NBA does not acknowledge White as the catalyst, the mental health conversation has advanced over the past few years – with others at the forefront. The “Mind Health” program in the NBA Cares initiative has been around for at least 12 years, according to league officials. Former player Jay Williams, who suffered from depression stemming from a career-ending motorcycle accident, recently became the spokesperson.

Love wrote about suffering a panic attack during a game in a 2018 Players’ Tribune essay that was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. DeRozan revealed his struggles with depression in a tweet, later saying that fans and people in league circles encouraged him. Last May, NBA Cares partnered with the Jed Foundation to put out a PSA with both stars, encouraging communities to view mental health as equally important as physical health.

White maintains the NBA’s changing tone is insincere.

“They can put ‘NBA Cares’ out in front of themselves as a shield, but you and I and everybody else knows that’s not how they operate,” White said.

“On the other side of it, they’re selling alcohol to people 82 to 100 nights of the year with no limit. … A player who is coping with issues by smoking marijuana, they’re fining him $50,000 dollars and telling him he has a couple more strikes or else he’s kicked out of the league.”

Earlier this year at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston (which was founded by Rockets general manager Daryl Morey), veteran basketball writer Bill Simmons asked Adam Silver why so many players seemed “unhappy.” Silver – who was not the commissioner during White’s saga with the Rockets – offered a candid response tackling the mental health aspect.

“We live in a time of anxiety,” Silver said, going on to speak about the isolation and depression that many players feel. In the wake of Love’s and DeRozan’s admissions, the comments were again well-received.

So why, White asks, is the NBA so willing to embrace the conversation now, as opposed to seven years ago?

“It’s totally weasely and corrupt, it’s A1 snake s–t,” White said. “It’s just what an attorney would do. It’s like, we’ve dismissed mental health the whole time, but when we need to, we’ll use it as an angle, even to defend our players if it’s convenient.”

In 2013, writer Chuck Klosterman wrote a long feature for Grantland, a site founded by Simmons, that White believes “mocked” his mental illness. Simmons once called him “Royce ‘I Couldn’t Even Play One Minute And Earn My Own Basketball-Reference.com Page’ White” in an NBA “worst contracts” column.

“[They] mocked my entire position that mental health was an epidemic, that it was an epidemic within the NBA,” White said. “Now that the mental health conversation has started to take its true shape, and people have got more information, everyone is starting to change their tune.”