Washington Wizards point guard Gilbert Arenas was officially suspended by the NBA yesterday for the rest of the season. The suspension will amount to 50 games and cost Arenas somewhere between seven and eight million dollars.
50 games!? Seriously!? That’s all the punishment you get for bringing a gun into the workplace. Even more absurd, basketball writers are saying that if the Wizards try to void the 80 million dollars left on Arenas’s contract, they would probably lose.
So let me get this straight. A guy brings a gun into the workplace and gets suspended without pay for a while and doesn’t get fired. If the NFL Players Association is paying attention, they need to try to get their guys the same contracts that NBA players get.
I am a huge Gilbert Arenas and Washington Wizards fan but this is ridiculous. You have to make an example out of guys bring guns into the workplace, especially when they hear that you can’t do such a thing at the beginning of every season.
When this incident came to light, I thought that NBA commissioner David Stern would make sure that he taught Arenas and every other NBA player a lesson, especially after Arenas didn’t take responsibility for bringing the gun into the locker room and made light of it.
If I were Stern, Arenas would be out until after next season’s All-Star break. With all the people that are killed by guns each year, you can’t take this situation too lightly. What if the gun would’ve gone off? What if a team employee had accidentally shot themselves while cleaning out his locker.
Like I said before, I am a huge Arenas fan, but he got off lucky. He should be suspended longer and the Wizards allowed to immediately tear up his contract. To me, that would’ve sent a message that no NBA player would forget.
Tags: arena, basketball, david stern, gilbert arenas, gun, jerome foster, nba, suspended, washington, wizards
