Arenas criticizes team, is ready to play

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By Mike Jones

The leg looked as if it belonged to someone who had been in a coma for a year, not a world-class athlete who a year earlier had signed a $111 million contract. Atrophy set in; signals weren't being sent properly. The muscles in Gilbert Arenas' left leg, in essence, had been switched to "off."

Those were the findings of trainer Tim Grover when the Washington Wizards' three-time NBA All-Star turned three-time surgery patient reported this summer to Attack Athletics, a Chicago training facility with a client roster of high-profile athletes.

"A lot of things weren't firing - his glutes, his hips, thighs," Mr. Grover said in a telephone interview Monday night. "I wouldn't say his condition was the most severe, I wouldn't say it was the best. ... But if I were to classify it on a scale of one to 10 with 10 being the most extreme, I'd say he was definitely in the seven, eight category."

And now, less than two weeks before the Wizards start training camp, Arenas and Mr. Grover say the guard is at full strength and better than ever - a claim that, if true, makes his decision to finally work with Mr. Grover look brilliant and, perhaps, career-saving.

"Nobody could guard me before, and can't nobody guard me now," Arenas, 27, told The Washington Times last week, breaking a silence he maintained since departing for Chicago in July. "If I hadn't come up here, I'd be starting off the season with a 95 percent chance that I'd be sitting out more games. ... [Mr. Grover] saved my career."

Arenas was one of the best and most electrifying players in the National Basketball Association when he tore the lateral meniscus in his left knee near the end of the 2006-07 season. He underwent surgery, made an aborted comeback attempt the next season, underwent surgery again, came back later that season and underwent a third surgery that kept him out of all but two games last season.

Arenas credits Mr. Grover, who earned his reputation for his work with former NBA superstar Michael Jordan, for bringing that painful saga to a conclusion and says he harbors no ill will toward the Wizards' doctors and trainers.

Still, Arenas to some degree blames the club for his failed comebacks over the past two seasons, saying he was given too much power over his own situation.

"They handled me going off what they had seen before and said, 'You can't lift weights because you might chip a bone,' " Arenas said. "That's their experience. Everybody has theirs. It took me two years to realize that I was a case study. Ultimately, I can prove I can get hurt, sit out two years and come back and be as good as I was.

"If you have a kid that loves basketball, that eats, sleeps, drinks and thinks basketball and all he knows is basketball and he gets hurt and he's your franchise player, you need to hold him back from himself," Arenas said. "If I'm saying I feel good and you know it's supposed to take six months, instead of letting me at four months run ... they should have held me back. Rather than saying, 'Let's let this guy do what he wants and use him to sell tickets' - sometimes you have to protect players from themselves. I don't feel like I got that type of protection. But, I don't judge them for that. Some things just happen. I told them I felt OK because I wanted to play, and they did what they did."