This Sports Report On 'One Piece's NBA Cameo Is Hilariously Bizarre

THIS IS SO FUNNY BUT IM CRINGING pic.twitter.com/EaEbM5wnhD

— dani (@zosanji) April 17, 2018

If you hadn't noticed, anime and sports go together real well. Yes, the medium does have its own sports genre where titles like Haikyu!! thrive, but a large number of real-world athletes are otakus through and through. From soccer to football, you can find anime fans on most major sports teams, and One Piece just got spotlighted by the NBA because of one player.

And, as you can see above, one sports report decided to do some research and inform the world about Monkey D. Luffy.

Recently, a clip started going around the Internet starring reporter Kristen Kenney as she covered an NBA game starring the Utah Jazz. The team was playing a game with Rudy Gobert on the court, and the center got down to business while wearing some custom sneakers. So, naturally, AT&T Sport Net needed to dive into the sweet anime shoes.

Sure, the report may butcher Luffy's name a tad, but fans admit they didn't expect to see the pirate even brought up on cable. Not only did the program highlight the shoes Gobert was rocking courtesy of Kickstradomis, but it also gave a little lesson on Luffy. As Kenney explains, the hero is known as a loyal leader, and it seems that description fits Gobert as well.

Still, fans are a bit salty about the package's final moments. One of the show's commentators can be heard asking what happened to superheroes since Gobert chose an anime character to grace his shoes. Audiences may want to check themselves before they get too upset; These guys didn't have One Piece's sale numbers around to let them know it is poised to outsell Batman soon enough. It is no biggie... not really.

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best selling manga series worldwide with 430 million copies sold worldwide.

Did you expect Luffy to pop his head into the NBA out of nowhere? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics, k-pop, and anime!