The NBA Players Who Brought Guns to The Locker Room
Arenas and Crittenton got suspended for a year over a card game
When I grew up watching the NBA, Gilbert Arenas was the star player on the Washington Wizards. They weren’t my favorite team, but I felt like they always underperformed — with Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler, and Antawn Jamison, I felt like the team had enough talent to win the NBA championship. However, they would be decimated by injury. Gilbert Arenas was a particularly talented player, known as “Agent Zero” and averaging over 25 points per game between 2004 and 2007.
However, I remember something crazy happened to the team in late 2009. I didn’t think less of Arenas or the Wizards as a whole — I just remember the events being bizarre.
News broke that Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton brought guns into the locker room. According to Howard Beck in the New York Times, Arenas was charged with a felony gun possession, which carried the possibility of five years of jail time. Since the guns were brought into the Verizon Center in D.C., the gun control laws were especially strict.
Arenas later said he stored four unloaded guns in the locker room as a joke against Crittenton. He asked Crittenton to “pick one” after an argument over gambling debt where Crittenton threatened to…
