The 2009 gun showdown between Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton remains one of the craziest feuds in NBA history. By now you are probably aware of both men being suspended for the remainder of the NBA season after a practice gun battle in the locker room.
In an in-depth piece for Action Network by Jon Gold, Arenas opens up on the card game and trash talk which led him to bring four guns to the Wizards locker room. Ultimately, Arenas laid out all four guns in the locker room and told Crittenton “Hey, MF, come pick one Javaris while I’m going to shoot your [expletive] with one of these.”
Midway through Crittenton’s rookie season, the Lakers shipped him to the Memphis Grizzlies in the trade that brought Pau Gasol to LA, and less than a year later, the Grizzlies moved him to the Wizards, who used him as a reserve. In the Wizards’ locker room, Arenas was a brash alpha male, the top dog and highest earner, and Crittenton was a newcomer and significantly lower on the totem pole, if on it at all. Crittenton’s salary during the 2009-10 season — $1.48 million — was less than one-tenth of Arenas’ $16.2 million payday.
Their beef, too, started on a team flight, when Arenas awoke from a nap and stumbled up to a game of booray already in progress. Crittenton was on a bad losing streak. “Javaris had gotten booed twice already, and I walk into the game when he gets booed on his own deal,” Arenas said. “Booed on his own deal! I mean, this man was bleeding. I’m already hyped because there’s $1,100 in the pot. I smell the blood. … I came in on my deal, and already he’s fucking livid. He’s all heat. ‘This is bullshit! How you gonna get in the game now?!’ He’s upset because he started thinking about the odds, and he’s the last person to get the cards.”
In the NBA game, at least the way the Wizards were playing that night, a new player could enter the game by matching the pot. Now there was $2,200 in the pot, and Arenas was the dealer, with a noted advantage: He’d have his pick of trump cards, and he’d be the last to act on the first round of the hand.Then Arenas put his famous mouth to work.
“I’m talking my good old shit. ‘Ooooh yeah baby, don’t fall asleep now.’ When anyone was getting killed, I’d hit the stewardess button. ‘Oh no, we have a jumper. Tell the pilot! We have a jumper, people!’ And Javaris is 1,000 degrees hot. But everyone knows my style. I’m gonna keep poking. I want you fucked up. I flip over a 10 (of spades, establishing the trump card). Oh shit, we live baby! Ain’t no deuces over here!”
Then Arenas notices JaVale McGee flash Earl Boykins a look.McGee hinted to Boykins that he had a dominant hand — “the shit,” as Arenas called it, “the ace, king and queen!” all in the trump suit — and Boykins folded. McGee screamed, “I don’t need none” — as in, no new cards — and then Arenas looked at Crittenton, who’s next. “Javaris has a look like he needs a full five,” Arenas said, laughing. “He’s motherfucking me, motherfucking the game. He screams out ‘Five!’”
Crittenton’s hand was so bad he would need five entirely new cards. Arenas continues: “I scream, ‘Oh shit, I think he’s going to choke himself with the seat belt. This is about to be a boo record, people!’”
By now, Arenas knows that McGee has what would be an unbeatable hand, and he folds his cards face up, revealing three trump cards. Crittenton starts screaming. Arenas snaps back: “You all by yourself. All acting like kids. I’m gonna let you play your game.”Arenas walks back to the back of the plane where he was sleeping. “Now [Crittenton] is only madder. I came in, doubled the pot, got him booed, and he’s like, ‘This motherfucker set me up!’” They play out the hand, with McGee holding four spades, including the A-K-Q, all trumps and a king of hearts.
“They figured it out, JaVale wins,” Arenas said. “The plane lands and now Javaris says to JaVale, ‘So you just gonna let me lose my money like that? You ain’t even gonna be a real n—- and give me a chance to get my money back? Aw hell naw, this is the type of shit that gets you fucked up in these streets.’ I was like, ‘Javaris, I will burn your car, while you’re in it. Then we’ll find an extinguisher to help ya ass out,’ and he says, ‘Well, I’ll just shoot you then.’ I said, ‘Man, I’ll bring you the guns to shoot me!’”
At practice two days later (after an off-day), Arenas brought four unloaded guns into the Wizards’ locker room and laid them out on a table. The guns included a Smith & Wesson Model 29 — “The Dirty Harry gun” — and a gold-plated Desert Eagle, the same gun used by Nicolas Cage in the movie “Face/Off.”
“It was about me calling his bluff,” Arenas said. “You say you’re going to shoot me? Fine, I’ll bring you the guns to do it.” Arenas says this was all a joke, another way to goad the volatile Crittenton. Some of his teammates didn’t see it that way. “When I entered the locker room, I thought I had somehow been transported back to my days on the streets of Racine,” Wizards teammate Caron Butler wrote in his 2015 biography. “Gilbert was standing in front of his two locker stalls, the ones previously used by Michael Jordan, with four guns on display. Javaris was standing in front of his own stall, his back to Gilbert.
“Hey, MF, come pick one,” Gilbert told Javaris while pointing to the weapons. “I’m going to shoot your [expletive] with one of these.” “Oh no, you don’t need to shoot me with one of those,” said Javaris, turning around slowly like a gunslinger in the Old West. “I’ve got one right here.” He pulled out his own gun, already loaded, cocked it and pointed it at Gilbert.
Other players who had been casually arriving, laughing and joking with each other, came to a sudden halt, their eyes bugging out. It took them only a few seconds to realize this was for real, a shootaround of a whole different nature. They all looked at each other and then they ran, the last man out locking the door behind him. “I didn’t panic because I’d been through far worse, heard gunshots more times than I could count, and seen it all before,” Butler’s biography continues. “This would have been just another day on the south side.”
“This had nothing to do with gambling debts,” Arenas said, disputing what had become the oft-reported explanation for the locker-room showdown. “It was about the shit-talking while I was losing. It was like someone scoring on you every time down. I’m the designated shit-talker. I could be down $40,000, but if I irritated someone so bad they feel like they lost $20K? I’m happy. I won. I don’t feel like the biggest loser of the night.”
Arenas hasn’t exactly stayed out of the public limelight since the infamous incident. In early June, Arenas had a temporary restraining order taken out against him by a woman who claimed that he threatened to send nude photos of her to her son. A Los Angeles judge tossed the order on July 27 after neither Arenas nor the woman showed up for the court hearing.
Crittenton never played in the league again following the suspension. Currently he is serving a 23-year sentence on manslaughter charges.
