Gilbert Arenas led off Washington Wizards media day in strong fashion, saying he wasn’t planning on talking to media this season during what ended up being a half-hour session with reporters.
I’ll get to the other players in due time, but for now, here are some quality Arenas highlights, starting with his assertion that the days of Agent Zero and hibachi are gone: “I’m 27 now. I’m not the entertainer anymore. I wouldn’t be here today if there wasn’t a big fine coming because I don’t feel like speaking anymore. I just want to go out there and play.”
So no more with the media? “Not from me. If I’m not going to get fined, I don’t think you’re going to hear me again. I don’t have a blog, I don’t have a tweeter. When I was entertaining and playing, all you guys focused on was my words. Now I’d rather you just focus on my basketball. Cut the gimmick out and just play basketball.”
Check out how he loosens up over the course of the rest of these quotes.
On his goals for this season: “To play 82 games. That’s my goal. I just want to play 82 games. I’ve played it once in my career. I would like to try it again.”
On why he chose to use trainer Tim Grover in Chicago this summer: “I think I milked up all my other resources, and that was the last one was the last one that I was dodging, I guess. He helped Dywane Wade get his career back. I wanted to see if he could do the same for me.”
On his relationship with Flip Saunders: “Besides my high school coach and Lute Olson, he’s the only one that I actually have conversations with more than once. It surprised me, especially when you read the paper. I thought he was going to try to stay away from me, like I had the Ebola virus or something. But from the first day, our first conversation, we spoke 45 minutes, and from every day on, he texted me about three times a day.”
On whether his serious tenor should apply throughout the team: “You’ve got to be yourself. You don’t want people to be what they aren’t. I’m just choosing I don’t want to entertain anymore. I just want to go out there and play… I don’t know how everyone’s going to react. Everyone’s used to me lightening up the moods before the game and before practice so that just might affect that aspect.”
On being asked by Saunders to be a leader: “What is a leader before I answer that one. Is a leader a guy who comes to the gym at 7 o’clock when practice is at 11, or when the game’s at 7, and you come at 3:30, and you go out there and play hard – is that a leader? Or is a leader something you say: ‘Coach, I’m a leader,’ and he says in the paper I’m a leader, and I’m a leader. Is that a leader? I have no idea. Before, my first year here Eddie [Jordan] appointed [Jerry] Stackhouse and Larry [Hughes] to be the leader. He didn’t want me to be the leader. He said I was too young. So from that moment I was never the leader. In my mind I was too young. So every time he tried to appoint me the leader I just didn’t want to be it. This year Flip said, ‘I want you to be my leader,’ so I said, ‘Okay.'”
On what the Wizards need to do to improve defensively: “Defense comes with defensive concepts. If you don’t have a defensive concept, and you have an offensive concept, you’re going to play offense… You’ve got to asked coach if he has a defensive concept. Before we did the Princeton. That’s offense.”
There were other odds and ends, too, including Arenas claiming he only plans to take about 100 three-pointers this season due to changes under Saunders, that he plans on continuing twhat he did during his summer rehab — lift weights with his legs — during the season, and this gem: “When I was playing I wasn’t hard to coach but the two years I don’t play for some reason I was hard to coach. That was funny to me. I’m not playing and I’m hard to coach? Okay.”
He also volunteered a story about this game: “The day I came out against Milwaukee when no one knew I was coming out. It was actually Eddie Jordan’s plan. It wasn’t mine. He told me to, “Come out at 6 minutes on the timeout so if the crowd’s not into the game or the team’s not playing very well when you come out it will bring the energy back in.’
What, then, was the whole ‘I didn’t know Gilbert was going to play’ thing? “Smoke and mirrors. Gilbertology. That was just one of things I had to clear. It’s kind of funny how I’m big head case around here.”
And then, to close, he gave his rant on what it means to be a “pure point guard”: “Usually your starting point guard can score, and the backup maintains the court. If you’re saying, are there pure point guards in today’s game? There’s Chris Paul and Deron Williams, and they average 22 and 10. Is that a pure point guard? Does it go by assist numbers? Is Tony Parker a pure point guard? It’s hard to say, is Derek Fisher a pure point guard? He doesn’t average any assists because he doesn’t have the ball. That’s what I’m saying, which one is a pure point guard? I think the game has evolved so much and the mindset about how much in the NBA we don’t get the concept anymore. The only pure point guard we really have in today’s game is still [Jason] Kidd. You want to say [Steve] Nash, but he still scores. He still averages 17, 18 points. When he first got to Phoenix, he averaged, like, 16 and 11, strictly point guard. If you average 22 and 10, you’re a scorer who can pass the ball. Are you a scorer who has the ball in his hand enough that you can get 10 assists? To me, there’s no difference between what Chris Paul is doing and what [Stephon] Marbury did in his prime, and you guys call that [expletive] a ball hog. He averaged 20 and 10. One’s a pure point, and one’s a ball hog, and they had the same numbers.”
Digest it how you like. It’s going to be an “entertaining” season.
