A few months ago, I wrote about how Gilbert Arenas is one of my favorite NBA players. Subsequently, he started keeping a blog on NBA.com, which I dutifully added to my blogroll.
I’ve come to enjoy Arenas more this year, because he’s a throwback to an era of absolutely crazy players. That he can back this up by scoring tons of points for a moderately successful team makes him even more entertaining to me.
A while back, he declared that he was better than Kobe Bryant at the same point (5+ years in the NBA) in their careers. Then he detailed the process of dropping 51 and a buzzer-beating game-winner on Utah.
But that was only a prelude to today’s “it can’t get any better than this, even if it’s from a player who nicknamed himself Hibachi when he gets on a hot streak” post.
See, Gil got dumped by USA basketball during the tryouts for the team that would compete at the World Championships last summer. He’s held a grudge against the pro coaches who cut him: Phoenix’s Mike D’Antoni (Gil dropped 54 on them in December) and Portland’s Nate McMillan (circle February 11 and March 20 in your calendars, hoops fans. Or as Gil puts it, “I think ESPN or TNT needs to pick that game up.”).
Still, the head coach of Team USA, and presumably one of the key decision-makers who kept Arenas off the squad, was Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski. How can our hero ever get revenge on Coach K? As he tells us today:
D’Antoni said that after I scored 54 on them and made my prediction to score 50 on the Blazers that he’d like to see what I’m going to do against Duke.
I thought it was funny because if I have the chance to go back to college, I’ll give up one NBA season to play against Duke.
One college game . . . that’s five fouls, right? . . . 40-minute game . . . at Duke, they got soft rims . . . I’d probably score 84 or 85.
I wouldn’t pass the ball.
I wouldn’t even think about passing it. It would be like a NBA Live or an NBA 2K7 game, you just shoot with one person.
What boggles my mind is that there’s an NBA player who actually thinks this way and still makes his team better.