The owner of the Washington Wizards, Ted Leonsis, reflected about trading Gilbert Arenas on his blog this morning.
Here are some excerpts from the blog entry:
I have always been a supporter of Gilbert Arenas. As a fan and now as an owner.
....
I was always hopeful that Gilbert would help our team in its rebuild process.
I have been unabashed in noting that we have to rebuild around our core of young players.We will suffer though a lot of pain but we will be stronger for it. The rebuild will take along time for us to get to where we want to be - an elite team. Building a truly special team has lots of risk.
The facts are the facts with Gilbert playing huge minutes for us. We were in basically last place in the East. He has intimated that he would feel more comfortable playing for a contender and not playing as a mentor to young players. He needed a fresh start and I wish him well in this next phase of his career.
And with that, the Wizards are in a full fledged rebuild mode. The last piece of the former group is out of the building, and this team now belongs to John Wall.
Time will tell if Leonsis' approach to rebuilding the Wizards will yield the same results as it did with the Capitals.