On the day that NBA commissioner David Stern reportedly told Gilbert Arenas and the Washington Wizards to keep their traps shut about Arenas’ gun conviction, Arenas’ lawyers were in California filing court papers fighting a penny-ante lawsuit by a gun dealer.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The NBA basically issued an edict for Arenas to shut up last week. Meanwhile, Arenas’ lawyers, rather than simply paying a bill a California gun dealer says is due, filed papers in a public courthouse and fanned the flames that nearly burned NBA basketball in Washington to the ground last season.
It just illustrates that no matter how much Stern and new Wizards owner Ted Leonsis want to wipe away the memory of what Arenas did — including his bizarre and destructive track record before he brought guns into the team locker room last year in a feud with teammate Javaris Crittenton — it won’t matter.
There will always be an incident, act, or, in this case, needless leftover damage from the path of Arenas’ destruction. Arenas’ behavioral issues are documented back to his college days, when The Tucson Citizen reported that Arenas often played pranks on Arizona teammate Gene Edgerson, “creating tension between the two.” Jason Gardner was once asked about Gilbert’s pranks at Arizona, and didn’t want to go into details about them.
“It could mean a little trouble for Gilbert,” Gardner said. “Maybe even cause him not to start.”
Throughout his career, Arenas’ behavior has been destructive to those around him, from wrecking a teammate’s personal items to defecating in their shoes, according to published reports. And this doesn’t even include his disregard for coaches and management during his Wizards career.
You think 30 days in a halfway house and some community service is going to change that?
There always will be something that reminds everyone of what happened, such as this lawsuit, which was filed in April by Tactical Operations, a California gun dealer that claimed Arenas purchased — before the Wizards gun incident — five custom Beretta pistols and five silencers, but never picked them up and owed the company $70,000 in storage fees.
Last week, as Stern called for silence, Arenas’ lawyers went to court with the following claim: “It is a felony for any person … to possess any silencer for firearms” and it was therefore “illegal for [Tactical Operations] to sell any silencer to Arenas,” according to TMZ.com.
Now that may be a perfectly valid defense, but it only adds to the ridiculousness that is Gilbert Arenas, who, when it comes down to it, is claiming that it would have been illegal for him to own silencers, so it was illegal for the dealer to sell them to him.
Why not just pay this off and bury yet another piece of evidence of this embarrassment? And what did Arenas want with silencers anyway?
Stern and the Wizards don’t want to hear that answer, because they all live in fear of the next Arenas blowup or scandal. For all the talk of re-embracing Arenas, they are living with this fear simply because the team owes him $80 million.
The Wizards may find out that as expensive as it would have been to say goodbye to Arenas, it may wind up costing them more to say hello again.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN 980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
