And I appreciate your diplomacy (seriously), but a lot of athletes have their intelligence underestimated because they are minorities and only went to college for one or two years...but mostly because they are minorities. The notion that someone young and African-American who can jump out of the gym might also be really smart is not something that's common to consider unfortunately.
For example, investing in start-ups is good but raising gluttonous amounts of money with a terrible product or business plan is bad. If we have a bunch of articles glorifying industry outsiders parking their money here, it will raise a reciprocal amount of Uber and dollar shave club clones which take away from "more-worthy" projects.
I don't think this is true for the majority of Americans anymore in regards to sports athletes. My finger on the rather sensitive topic is it has more to do with how different groups perceive one's culture (and potential ignorance thereof) than race. You'll be hard press to find, save the few rare 0.1% fringe racists or trolls, questions around Russell Wilson's intelligence, or Patrick Mahomes, or Kobe Bryant, or Richard Sherman. If you simply google "smartest athletes" you get a pretty diverse representation of African American athletes, White athletes, and everything in between.
Also working against famous athletes, is the fact that pop culture and celebrity is generally not associated with intelligence in America on a whole.
But lets not fool ourselves either, there is also a lot of celebrity investments where a famous name is slapped on a lifestyle product like vitamin water, the celebrity makes millions, and the consumers ultimately get shafted because more often then not the celebrity name is just credentialism to up-sell a mediocre product. Shark tank does this as well because they know as soon as the show airs there will be a huge spike in sales by default.
Sometimes this is really bad for society as was the case with Theranos board of directors and any of the Kardashian brands. We shouldn't let celebrities amplify pump and dump schemes. I don't think the NBA players you listed have been involved, but I think its always important that we are vigilant for it...