Bottom Of The Barrel

Blog gets the better of him

Gilbert Arenas and the Washington Wizards lost to the Portland Trailblazers last Tuesday night 100-98. The pre-game story line was that Arenas, third in the NBA averaging 28.8 points entering the game, vowed to score 50 against both the Blazers and Phoenix Suns when he was cut from the U.S. national team last summer [Suns coach Mike D'Antoni and Blazers coach Nate McMillan were assistants on the U.S. team - he went on to drop 54 on the Suns back on December 22nd]. Providing more fuel to the fire, during a shoot around interview he stated that his presence gave fans a reason to come to the game since Portland was out of the playoffs and struggling. All night fans boo him every time he touches the ball and Arenas is enjoying every minute of it. He does not deliver on his 50 point promise but is rather held to 19 points and 10 assists and as the game winds down [and the game is very close] he makes $10 bet with two fans that if he had the chance, he would make the game-winning basket. He missed the final shot in the loss and walked away with their e-mail addresses so that he could pay them off.

All of this seemed to be fine until Arenas posted details of the bet on his NBA blog [which has since been taken down by the league]. This seems hypocritical to me. It's ok that a player states he going to go wild and score 50 on an opponent, it's ok for him to disparage another team prior to the game to get the home crowd fired up, it's ok to trash talk with the spectators in the front row all game and it's even ok to ask them to put their money where their mouth is at the end of the game with a friendly wager but it's not ok to write about it after the fact. So it seems that the NBA is fine with what these guys do as long as it is not gambling - even if you are gambling on yourself to win.

Ironically the NBA has given a forum for the players to blog about themselves on NBA.com to try and enrich their site and give the fans a new way to interact with the star players. Maybe the NBA's PR department should blog for the players that way the corporate message could be sent out for each post.

I'm sure this post removal and admonishment by the league will not stop Arenas from playing him game and putting on a good show but I bet he just won't blog about every detail.

Labels: NBA

posted by TheWino @ 8:00 AM