Gilbert Arenas said he’s doing great with his knee rehab, but criticized the Wizards for — get this — letting him play when he said that he could play.
“If you have a kid that loves basketball, that eats, sleeps, drinks and thinks basketball and all he knows is basketball and he gets hurt and he’s your franchise player, you need to hold him back from himself,” Arenas told the newspaper. “If I’m saying I feel good and you know it’s supposed to take six months, instead of letting me at four months run … they should have held me back. Rather than saying, ‘Let’s let this guy do what he wants and use him to sell tickets’ — sometimes you have to protect players from themselves. I don’t feel like I got that type of protection. But, I don’t judge them for that. Some things just happen. I told them I felt OK because I wanted to play, and they did what they did.”
Man, that takes balls, doesn’t it? Sometimes you have to protect players from themselves. Give me a break.
Athletes come back early from injuries all the time. Sometimes it backfires and sometimes it doesn’t. If Arenas told the team he was ready to go, it’s not the Wizards’ fault that he wasn’t. It’s his fault.
Had the team pressured Arenas to get back on the court, then this criticism would be justified. But for Arenas to blame the Wizards for his mistake is pure projection.
