Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton were involved in one of the most infamous locker room incidents in NBA history in 2009. Arenas and Crittenton had drawn guns on each other when they were teammates on the Washington Wizards, and the incident is the focus of the new Netflix documentary, Untold: Shooting Guards. In it, Arenas and Crittenton spoke about the events leading up to that fateful day.
‘Yo, when you drive into the arena, I’ma throw gasoline on your car and burn it while you in it.’ That was my threat to him,” Arenas said.
Arenas and Crittenton were clashing here over a game of booray on a team flight in December. The former admitted he was trying to irritate the latter, and he couldn’t have imagined how that was going to backfire.
“If you shoot up my car, I’m going to shoot you in them bum-a** knees you got,” Crittenton told Arenas.
Arenas hilariously told Crittenton in response that he didn’t care, as his knee was already in bad shape.
“You keep talking about fighting, I play with guns,” Crittenton said. “You better ask about me.”
“My comeback was, ‘I want to see you do it, I’ll bring you the guns,'” Arenas stated. “… [I said] ‘Are you man enough? Do you have two of these to shoot me? You ain’t got the cojones to do nothing like that. You ain’t even built to do nothing like that.'”
Arenas would bring unloaded firearms into the locker room days later. Much to his and his teammates’ shock, Crittenton pulled out a loaded one. While no one ended up getting hurt, it certainly wasn’t a great look.
To make matters worse, Arenas then pretended to shoot his teammates during pregame introductions, and that would prove to be the nail in the coffin. Then-NBA commissioner David Stern suspended both him and Crittenton for the rest of the season in January 2010.
The Wizards would release Crittenton after his suspension ended, and he would never play in the NBA again. Arenas, meanwhile, did return to the Wizards, but he wouldn’t be with the team for too much longer. He was traded to the Orlando Magic in December 2010 and was out of the league by 2012.
Arenas’ and Crittenton’s lives certainly went in very different directions following their time in the NBA. Arenas transitioned to sports media and has now become one of the more prominent talking heads in the industry.
As for Crittenton, well, he shot and killed Jullian Jones, a 22-year-old mother of four, in 2011. She was reportedly not his target, and he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in 2015. Crittenton was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but the term was later reduced to 10 years, and he was released on April 21, 2023.
