Ah, it feels like the rest of the season again, with off-court stuff making it hard to focus on the game at hand.
The first question for Wizards head coach Flip Saunders in his pregame media chat today was about Gilbert Arenas, who will be sentenced Friday.
“We’ll just wait and see what happens Friday. We’ll make a comment that day,” said Saunders, who has spoken with Arenas recently, but “I think that’s something I’ll keep between us, but that’s not for anyone else. The people he talks with, I think it’s pretty personal right now.”
Meanwhile, memos from both the prosecution and the defense were submitted today. The latter is 127 pages, including countless letters defending Arenas’s character. Tell you what, I’ll put significant quotes in this post as I work my way through it.
Introduction
“This input has been uniformly positive and supportive, and paints a picture of a man who is somewhat off-beat, but fundamentally very decent and unfailingly kind to others.”
On Arenas’s humor
Quote from Gilbert Arenas Sr.: his son has always been “very fragile in a lot of ways; he just laughs and smiles to hide the pain.”
14 pages in, and as has been pointed out to me, no statements on Arenas’s behalf by any Wizards players or coaches. Mystics guard Alana Beard is quoted, as is Wizards equipment manager Rob Suller: “Gilbert has shown caring and compassion beyond what myself and my family could ever thank him enough for.”
“He has not engaged in a so much as a fistfight since he was a little child, despite the many opportunities therefor in the high-pressure contact sport he has played for the past 17 years. He does, however, have a record of engaging in pranks that can go too far.”
“While these actions [the gun-shooting pantomine before the Philadelphia game on Jan. 5] can surely be criticized as unwise, they do not actually reflect any equivocation about his contrition for bringing guns into the Verizon Center.”
