I like Arenas. He's an entertaining personality. But, as a member of the players' fraternity, I'm not sure commenting negatively on the salary situation of his colleagues is in anyone's best interest, except perhaps his own. The reality is that the NBA salary grab is a competitive battleground with minimal max money slots available and, frequently, multiple players even from the same team vying for those slots. That these negotiations make their way into the public domain, often deliberately I assume, reflects the importance of generating hype and harnessing media pressure either to directly force the hand of a team or to attract interest from other bidders. To undermine that, by not so subtly dismissing the value of the players mentioned (Iguodala, Okafor), is doing them a disservice, regardless of whether his assessment of their decision to turn down the initial offer is accurate.

The occasional occurence, where contract issues affect performance, also appears to be a smokescreen and certainly is not applicable to 2 out of the 3 examples he provides; instead, Okafor and Iggy, who appear to be improving on their star play, are unfairly painted as greedy, undeserving middle-of-the-pack stars. With Arenas's opt-out arriving and his injury issues continuing, I don't think its a stretch to suspect Arenas of trying to manipulate the market a litle bit. It shouldn't be a shocker if he gets rebuked by the player's union.

Posted by TMS:

i doubt anyone here would appreciate their coworkers talking publically about your salary demands from your employers either.

Quite honestly, while I understand your point, it's an entirely different scenario. The NBA is public-ish about its salaries. Everyone knew their salaries anyway and word leaked about salary negotiations.

For this, although maybe it's not Gilbert's place to say something, if they were to get annoyed, the real people to get annoyed at are the ones who continually leak every piece of NBA gossip. Many of these items such as current salary and salary negotiations and supposed to be kept confidential as per the policy of many teams.

Posted by TMS:

it's completely different for a fan or sports writer to make these comments & for a fellow player to make them IMO... i bet if you asked those players he was referring to what they felt about Gilbert's comments, they'd probably tell him to STFU & keep his views to himself... just because some players have blogs doesn't give them a right to start talking about other players' contracts... Curt Schilling did the same thing on the topic of ARod's contract... i think he should worry about his own contract & so should Arenas.

I see your point. Like I said, it probably wasn't his place to speak about it. He did have good points in this case, though.

That being said, you won't see Gilbert Arenas winning the Mr. Nice Guy of the Year Award in the NBA. Some of his antics have had me convinced that the guy is looney tunes in the past.