MADELEINE BRAND, Host:
Hi, Mike.
MIKE PESCA: Hi.
BRAND: All right. So I understand that this whole thing, this incident, began with a gambling debt.
PESCA: And then what happened next, which was recently reported today by the Washington Post, they put out more details, apparently Crittenton responded to this - what Arenas called a joke - Crittenton responded to this by grabbing his own gun and loading it and chambering a round.
BRAND: He just happened to have a gun on him in the locker room?
PESCA: He has invented a secret identify for himself and he calls himself Agent Zero. He yells Hibachi before he shoots. So he's seen as this quirky guy. And even on his Twitter feed he always talks about laughter curing the pain. And he liked to make a joke of everything. And of course this joke went horribly too far and he faces federal charges. He faces perhaps city charges. And the NBA just wasn't having any of it. And the NBA did not like how he reacted to the incident afterwards, what he twittered and what he acted like during pre-game player introductions in a game against the Philadelphia 76ers on Tuesday.
BRAND: So, yeah, so they're not amused at all. He's joking around. He's on Twitter - guns, ha-ha. And David Stern says, no, you are going to be suspended without pay. And that's a lot of pay, right?
PESCA: Yeah, he has a $111 million contract. He's in the second year of that. He's owed $80 million. And so you know, in official statements, Arenas, I guess, struck the right tone, or whoever helped him with his official statements. He said things like, joke or not, I now recognize what I did was a mistake and I was wrong.
BRAND: and perhaps even worse.
BRAND: So, Mike, what's the next size 13 shoe to drop?
PESCA: We, you know, it could be the loss of the rest of his contract. That happened with Plaxico Burress, who's an NFL player who pled guilty to a guns charge. Could be a long suspension. The NBA is taking guns in the locker room as seriously as they could take anything.
BRAND: Well, what about this guy Crittenton?
PESCA: What Arenas says is that he was trying to cover up for Crittenton and this is why he took all of the blame. But right now the authorities are saying that it's going to be very hard to bring a charge against Crittenton because there's no proof that he ever even had a gun or that the gun was even real. But Arenas admitted to bringing his guns to the locker room because he wanted to take them out of his house.
BRAND: This is NPR News.