NBA Free Agents 2011: Teams Are Brilliant to Stay Away from Gilbert Arenas
Apparently former Washington Wizards superstar and current NBA free agent Gilbert Arenas is not attracting too much attention from interested teams.
In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet.
This can't be a surprising statement (the Arenas part) and truthfully I have to give immense props to teams for staying away from him so far.
Will Arenas get picked up this season? Yes, I have a feeling some desperate team is going to eventually need a shooter off the bench.
Will that happen soon though?
According to a tweet from Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated, the answer to that question looks to be no:
This shouldn't be surprising news, Arenas hit the downside of his career years ago.
He's far from the player that scored 29.3 points per game in 2005-06 and he's nowhere near being the player that has a career average of 21.2 points per game.
Frankly, it was the huge numbers he put up early in his career that keep that average as high as it is right now.
One look at his stat-line from last season paints a very different picture.
He averaged 10.8 points, 3.9 assists and 2.7 rebounds in 2010-11.
Is it his fault that he suffered two devastating knee injuries on the same knee that essentially derailed what looked to be a superstar career?
No, not at all.
It is his fault that he has the reputation as a "bad character" guy though, as I have a feeling that nobody forced him to bring guns into the Wizards locker room back in 2009-10.
You can't hide from the truth , and with Arenas, the truth is that he's simply too big of a risk.
Nobody knows what he's going to bring to the table, and if his knee is really limiting his movement that noticeably, I can't see him being an attractive signing before the season starts.
Eventually somebody is going to get hurt and perhaps a team will be forced into needing Arenas, and maybe he can go in and make some sort of an impact in a best case scenario.
Right now, the worst thing a team can do is pursue him though, so I applaud them for taking the safe route.
I don't think Arenas will be going anywhere anytime soon.
