Gilbert Arenas has happily begun to write a new basketball chapter in Memphis, and he understandably doesn’t like to revisit the darker moments of his NBA career. However, he did clarify what took place in the Wizards’ locker room on that fateful day that forever changed his life and the course of the Washington franchise. From USA Today: “Arenas spent 30 days in a halfway house after being convicted on gun charges stemming from a locker-room confrontation Dec. 21, 2009, with then-Wizards teammate Javaris Crittenton. Arenas also had to perform 400 hours of community service and pay a $5,000 fine. He was suspended for 50 games without pay for 2009-10 by NBA Commissioner David Stern. What Arenas says are misconceptions of what happened in that locker room still bother him. ‘No one actually saw a gun in my hand at all. … I was not pulling a gun on anyone. That’s actual fact,’ he says. Arenas, 30, had previously declined to go into great detail. This is what he says happened: Then-Wizards center JaVale McGee had beaten Crittenton out of $1,100 in a card game. Wizards guard Earl Boykins loaned McGee $200. McGee didn’t immediately pay back Boykins as he won the money and an argument blossomed. Arenas says he wasn’t involved in the actual bet. ‘Pay the man his (expletive) money. You’ve got all my money,’ Arenas says Crittenton shouted at McGee. ‘So I jumped in, ‘Why you talking to your teammates like this? We family.’ That’s when (Crittenton) started coming at me, ‘(Expletive, racial slur), just because you got all money, this and this and this.’ That’s when we started going back and forth. I didn’t owe him anything. It was over a $1,100 pot he just lost.’ Arenas pauses and sighs when asked how the situation escalated to the point of guns. ‘Someone said they were going to shoot me. So since I’m one of those guys who says, ‘I want to see this happen. I want to see you actually shoot me,’ that’s where that came from,’ says Arenas, declining to mention that someone by name. ‘I brought the four guns in and said (in a note), ‘Pick 1, so the day you want to shoot me let me know, I’ll be ready to get shot.’ That’s how.’ According to a D.C. Superior Court document from Jan. 15, 2010: Several witnesses agree that during an argument on a Dec. 20, 2009, flight from Phoenix to Washington, Arenas threatened to shoot Crittenton in the face and set his Escalade on fire and that Crittenton threatened to shoot Arenas in the knee. The document further details that witnesses saw Arenas lay out his firearms in front of Crittenton’s locker and that Crittenton brought out his own. […] Last August, Crittenton was arrested and charged with shooting from an SUV and killing a 23-year-old mother of four in Atlanta. She was walking with two men, according to police, including one who allegedly had robbed Crittenton of $55,000 in jewelry. Crittenton has yet to go to trial. Arenas, who says he spoke with Crittenton about one year ago, wouldn’t go into exactly what Crittenton did in the locker room because of the pending trial his former teammate faces.”
(h/t: CSTB)
