LeBron James’ teammates are usually quick to defend him from any unwarraneted criticism. But this time, Kendrick Perkins, the player he shared the locker room with during the 2016 NBA championship, pointed critique of the four-time champion’s suggestion that the Memphis Grizzlies should relocate to Nashville.

Perkins, on “The Road Trippin’ Show” on Sunday, broke from his usual posture on LeBron and went directly at the Nashville relocation comment.

“The problem I got with LeBron is, when you say sh*t like ‘just relocate to Nashville,’ it’s almost giving a big middle finger to the black people,” Perkins said. “On the flip side, this is what I’m saying. Bron, you got a I Promise school in Akron, Ohio. Because you were an inner-city kid growing up. So what if somebody told you to move that motherf*cker to Columbus somewhere?”

James’ comments about Memphis and possibly relocating it to Nashville came on the Bob Does Sports YouTube channel. He raised serious questions about Memphis’ hotels and facilities for professional athletes.

“I’m f*****g 41 years old, you think I want to do that sh** being in Memphis on a random Thursday?” James said on the show. “I’m not the first guy in the NBA to talk about this. You guys got to move the team… go over to Nashville already.”

Numerous NBA players, current and past, including Kevin Durant, Derrick White, Anthony Edwards, Draymond Green, Danny Green, Theo Pinson & Channing Frye, have complained about the city of Memphis and their hotels

Obviously, this take was going to follow James into his press conferences. He did not walk away from what he said on the YouTube show. 

“I’m 41 years old,” he said, per Dave McMenamin of ESPN. “There’s two cities I do not like playing in right now. That’s Milwaukee, and that’s Memphis.”

He added that he doesn’t even like going home to Cleveland. 

Memphis is approximately 63% Black, which is one of the largest majority-Black cities in the United States. The racial dimension of LeBron’s comments surfaced almost immediately after the Bob Does Sports clip spread. Memphis-based content creator Marques Cook said LeBron had gotten “privilege now” and called it “a privilege thing.” Furthermore, ESPN personality David Dennis Jr. labeled him a “gentrifier” for the way he dismissed a city with the demographic profile he described.

Anthony Sain of Bluff City Media pointed to the contrast between LeBron’s self-positioning as a social justice advocate and the way he treated a city that is, per capita, among the most Black-populated in America. When the racial framing was raised directly with James, he pushed back: “Did I say I don’t like Black people?” and then told critics to “chill.”

Perkins’s critique carried a different weight in that conversation than the general backlash. First, he is not a media figure looking for an angle; instead, he is a former teammate, a co-host on the same platform where LeBron has been consistently defended, and the argument he made turned LeBron’s most visible community legacy into the evidence against him.

The Same LeBron James Who Built a School for Inner-City Kids Just Told Memphis to Pack Up and Leave

When LeBron James opened the “I Promise School in Akron” in 2018, he did it because he believed that an inner-city with a majority-Black community deserved an institution built around the children who needed it most. 

The Grizzlies, according to multiple accounts from local media and fans, are a cultural and economic anchor for their community. The argument Kendrick Perkins made on The Road Trippin’ Show is that the same logic LeBron used to build I Promise (protect the inner-city community, don’t let the institution walk away from the people who need it) is the logic the four-time MVP set aside when he told that franchise to relocate because the hotels do not suit a 41-year-old billionaire on a Thursday night.

Grizzlies coach Tuomas Iisalo was asked about LeBron’s comments. He said that Memphis had one of the NBA’s most passionate fan bases and that the city was the right place for the Grizzlies. Additionally, Toronto Raptors coach Darko Rajakovic, who worked in Memphis before taking over in Toronto, said his experience was the exact opposite of James’s characterization. Locally, Joe Mullinax of the Locked On Grizzlies podcast described Memphis as a city where fans “eat, sleep, and breathe basketball,” and questioned whether Nashville, a hockey and country music market, had the same relationship with the sport.

However, LeBron’s agent, Rich Paul, spoke on the issue on his podcast after the controversy broke. He acknowledged that he probably should not have spoken about Memphis in that specific manner. And that was the most direct acknowledgment from anyone in James’s camp that the framing was off, and The Kid from Akron himself had not issued any public apology as of the time of this report.

Kendrick Perkins’ argument did not accuse him of anything categorical. It identified a specific contradiction between the man who built a school in an inner-city community because he understood what those communities meant to the people inside them, and the man who told one of America’s most prominent majority-Black cities to send its franchise 200 miles east.