On the latest episode of Durant's The Boardroom, streaming now on ESPN+, Durant sat down with LeBron James and his longtime friend and business partner Maverick Carter to speak about the business of basketball.
LeBron shared a story about realizing how the NCAA was profiting off of him when he was just a sophomore in high school. He explained, "Freshman year to my sophomore year they moved our home games to the [University of Akron]... My first game of my sophomore year was at the University of Akron and there like 6,000 people... and they sell season tickets. Right then and there as a sophomore at 15-years-old I knew that this was a business."
Carter added, "His senior year they actually put the games on pay-per-view. You could watch LeBron James games anywhere in the state if you paid like ten bucks."
Durant then spoke about feeling like the University of Texas was exploiting him, explaining, "I seen a 35 jersey on the rack and I'm just wondering like, why my name's not on the back of it. Everybody knows this is my jersey and it was just kind of confusing at that point because it was this in between period where it was like is this always about ball or they might be making money on the other side of this too. So I didn't know who to turn to, I had no guidance, and I was going to the NBA the next year. So it was like, I just want to play ball."
