And he should play.
The Wizards should not bench him and tank the rest of the season for hopes of winning the Lottery. In principle, that goes against everything that sports stands for, not to mention a shame to guys like Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler, who still show up, give their best effort every night, and take responsibility for the losses.
But even pragmatically, the Wizards don’t necessarily have much to gain by purposefully losing.
Theoeretically, they have a 25% chance of getting the top pick if they get the worst record. But in the 24 years that there has been a lottery, the worst teams have only gotten the top pick four times. In actuality, that translates to around 17%, which is a pretty bad deal if you keep on hoping for a good lottery pick when you could do so much more with the GM actively making moves for better players in the offseason.
In fact, sometimes to lose out on the draft is to win in the long run. Case in point: 2007 Boston Celtics, who had the second worst record that season, and should have gotten the second pick in the Draft. Instead, they got fifth. That prompted them to trade the pick to Seattle for Ray Allen, which initiated the deal that would land KG in Beantown.
That next year, they won the championship.
If they had gotten that first pick, though, do you think they would have traded away for Ray Allen and KG? No, they probably would have kept their young core and drafted either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant. Yay, more lottery.
But more importantly, it’s about Arenas gaining confidence in his knee. He has to know whether it will hold up, especially in game situations. You don’t get that from pickup games with undrafted free agents, or fullcourt workouts. If he knows his knee won’t tank on him, that will give him the confidence he needs for another breakout season next year. (It’s not gonna happen this late in the season; they’ll bring him in slowly for sure.)
And God knows how much I’ve missed Arenas. He had game to back up his swag. I want to see that arrogance back. I want to see him hit some clutch shots. I’m almost hoping for an Arenas game-winner tonight against Detroit.
If he shows premature flashes of Agent Zero, though, I’m buying his shoes over the summer.
The Arenas Is Back! by James Soriano, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines License.
