Gilbert Arenas, Teammate Allegedly Drew Guns on Each Other in Locker Room!!!

If the Gilbert Arenas gun story wasn't weird before, it surely is now. Last week, news broke that Wizards and the NBA were investigating whether Arenas's storing of a couple firearms in his locker at the Verizon Center violated league rules. Arenas claimed he moved his guns from his home to the locker room because after the birth of his daughter, he decided he didn't want his kids to be around firearms...read more and continue
That claim will now be called into question as the New York Post and Yahoo! Sports independently report that Arenas was allegedly involved in a standoff with teammate Javaris Crittenton on December 21. The District of Columbia police and the U.S. Attorney's Office are now involved, according to Yahoo!'s Adrian Wojnarowski.

The Post's Peter Vescey and David K. Li, citing one named source, report that Crittenton confronted Arenas about an unpaid gambling debt, leading Arenas to draw a weapon. Crittenton then drew a weapon of his own.

(And this, my friends, is why we don't keep guns in our lockers!)

Things are already terrible for the Wizards, and this won't make anything better. Crittenton hasn't played a minute this season owing to offseason surgery. Arenas will almost assuredly be severely punished for the alleged gun play (assuming the stand-off isn't completely fictional). Even beyond a potential loss of Arenas, the team will be tossed into some matter of turmoil in the short-term while every reporter within shouting distance of D.C. descends on the locker room.

For Arenas, it's all really become an exercise in making himself untradeable. His bulbuous contract is one matter, his injury (which clearly destroyed his once-brilliant first step) another. Having such a frightening episode on your resumé quarters the market -- many teams just won't touch players with image trouble. At least Ron Artest had a fair salary and a reputation for defense, you know?

There are two things which make this really, really sad to me. The first is that this is completely avoidable. How? Don't bring guns to work! You do not need steel protection at basketball practice. (Well, I suppose Crittenton would disagree with that assertion.) Fist fights happen in locker rooms. Heck, fist fights happen in the Wizards' locker room. That is decidedly less notable than a friggin' gun stand-off.

But most disheartening to me is that all this happened just weeks after the death of longtime Wizards owner Abe Pollin, a man who believed in Washington, D.C., believed in Arenas specifically and so wanted to take violence far away from the images of D.C. and the NBA that he renamed his franchise the Wizards. Abe would have been crestfallen to see this happen in the arena he built.

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