With word getting out that Los Angeles Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak held a private workout for Gilbert Arenas over the weekend, speculations are brewing stronger than ever about a possible return to the NBA for the former Agent Zero. It could be another chance to save his basketball career.
The rumblings of Lakers’ interest, in the point guard have been felt to some degree since David Stern put the kibosh on Chris Paul to Los Angeles, er, Kobe’s Los Angeles to be exact. Speaking of Bryant, he’s now — unsurprisingly — put his stamp of approval of a possible Arenas addition, responding when asked if he thought the Lakers needed Arenas by saying, “It certainly wouldn’t hurt, that’s for sure.”
It’s not an answer out of desperation, as Kobe likely wouldn’t admit feeling that way, and it’s not as if Arenas is the only option on the table, or maybe even the most desirable around the league. The Lakers feel they only need one or two pieces like him to complete the ‘Finals’ puzzle. Really, all Bryant’s doing is stating a fact. Gilbert Arenas at this point wouldn’t hurt the Lakers any more than Derek Fisher at 26 minutes a night. A chance at catching a revived Arenas for pennies on the dollar couldn’t hurt an established team like the Lakers, right? And what if it actually turned out well?
Worth noting is that it seems as though Arenas is prepared physically to give the NBA his best shot. With the help of some Kobe Bryant methods for recovery and rejuvenation — he received the same type of knee procedure that Bryant went to Germany for over the offseason and has since praised — Agent Zero supposedly looked good in the Lakers’ private workout, though it’s unclear what those actually consisted of.
The point is, if Arenas looks well enough to contribute what harm can be done? We all know how disappointing his tenure in Washington was for fans. In Orlando, though his play was well below-average, his payroll-devouring contract that the Magic willingly took on was just as big of a pariah, with only the amnesty clause of the new collective bargaining agreement relieving both sides from its grip.
As of now, if the Lakers were to make him an offer his toll on the overall team salary would be nonexistent in comparison. He’d be playing alongside one of the most straight-edge, bloodthirsty competitors of all-time in Kobe Bryant, who got another outcast of the league at one point in Ron Artest as a teammate. Kobe got Artest to gladly fall in line and play at a level good enough to win a championship, so why not Arenas?
Arenas’ competitiveness in his heyday was rocket fuel that seemingly launched him to any height he needed to reach at a given time; there was no occasion too large for the goofy assassin known as Hibachi. If there’s any of that left in him, being around Bryant would almost surely squeeze it out. And if things didn’t work out, Los Angeles wouldn’t have to find a trade partner with the payroll space the size of a small European country. If the experiment didn’t work, they could simply send Arenas back into free agency and searching for another chance to redeem himself.
It’s safe to say that Gilbert Arenas has scraped the bottom of his professional basketball career, a career which the common thread before the sad ending in Washington was that of proving everybody who expected little of him wrong — he wore number zero for a reason, after all. As fate would have it, the team who could most use Arenas’ return to his previous self, thanks to a leader keeping a close eye on the ol’ body clock, doesn’t have time for either low expectations nor standing pat.
If Arenas can return to some form of what we want to remember his as, it doesn’t have to be with Bryant and the Lakers, but it sure seems like as good a place as any.
Griffin Gotta contributes to The Hoop Doctors and is a co-managing editor of Straight Outta Vancouver. The story arcs and infinite weirdness of the NBA are addictions he deals with every day. Email him at griffingotta at gmail dot com.
