On the night of December 19, 2009, the Washington Wizards charter flight returned from Phoenix to Washington Dulles International Airport. The team had lost to the Phoenix Suns 121 to 96 earlier that evening and had a back-to-back game against the Charlotte Bobcats at home the following night. The flight was approximately four hours long. During the flight a card game was organized in the back of the plane. The game was a variant of Bourré, also called Boo-Ray, that was widely played in National Basketball Association locker rooms of the period. The principal players were point guard Gilbert Arenas, second-year point guard Javaris Crittenton, and several other Wizards players.
Arenas was the highest-paid player on the Washington Wizards roster of the 2009 to 2010 season. He had signed a six-year, 111 million dollar contract extension with the team in July 2008. He was 28 years old, a three-time NBA All-Star, and had been the franchise player of the Wizards since the team had drafted him in 2001. Crittenton was a 22-year-old point guard on a 1.1 million dollar rookie-scale contract. He had been drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in the first round of the 2007 NBA Draft, traded to the Memphis Grizzlies in February 2008 in the Pau Gasol package, and traded again to the Wizards in February 2009.
The card game produced a dispute. The exact mechanics have been described differently by Arenas and by Crittenton in subsequent published accounts. The substance is that Crittenton ended the game owing Arenas approximately 1,100 dollars in card debt. In the course of paying the debt the following day, Crittenton accused Arenas of having cheated during the flight. Arenas denied the cheating accusation. The argument escalated over the next two days. By December 21, 2009, Arenas had told Crittenton, by his own subsequent account, that he would bring a firearm to the next team practice and offer Crittenton a choice of weapons from his own personal collection.
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The next team practice was scheduled for the morning of December 21, 2009, at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. Arenas arrived at the practice facility before the rest of the team. He placed four handguns on a chair in front of Crittenton's locker. The handguns were licensed in Arenas's name and had been retrieved by him from his home in suburban Virginia earlier that morning. He left a handwritten note on the chair reading PICK ONE. He stepped back to wait for Crittenton's arrival. Crittenton arrived at the locker room within ten minutes. He looked at the chair, at the handguns, and at the note. He then drew a separate firearm of his own which he had brought to the facility independently and pointed it at Arenas.
The incident did not escalate further. No shots were fired. No physical injuries occurred. Several other Wizards players entered the locker room during the moments immediately following the firearms display and the situation defused without further incident. The team general manager, Ernie Grunfeld, was notified within the hour. The Washington Wizards organization notified the National Basketball Association league office in New York the same day. The league office initiated an internal investigation through its security department.
The incident was not publicly reported in the press for two more weeks. The first public account appeared in The New York Post on January 1, 2010, in a column by Peter Vecsey, the longest-tenured basketball columnist at the paper. The Vecsey account described the firearms display and the gambling-debt motivation in substantially accurate terms. The Vecsey publication produced an immediate response from NBA Commissioner David Stern. Stern requested a full briefing from the league security department on January 3, suspended Arenas indefinitely pending further review on January 6, and confirmed the suspension as a 50-game season-long ban on January 27, 2010. The 50-game ban cost Arenas approximately 7.4 million dollars in lost salary out of his 16.2 million dollar 2009 to 2010 contract figure.
The Crittenton suspension was issued separately. The NBA suspended Crittenton for the remainder of the 2009 to 2010 season effective January 27, 2010, on the basis that he had also brought a firearm to the practice facility and had pointed it at Arenas. The suspension was 38 games. Crittenton was a restricted free agent at the end of the season and was not signed by any NBA team for the 2010 to 2011 season. He never returned to the NBA at any level and never played in any major professional basketball league after the 2009 to 2010 season.
The criminal proceedings ran parallel to the league discipline. Arenas pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C., Superior Court in January 2010 to one count of carrying a pistol without a license, a misdemeanor under D.C. law. He was sentenced to two years of supervised probation, 30 days at a residential halfway house, and 400 hours of community service. He served the halfway house portion of the sentence in the spring of 2010. He was traded by the Wizards to the Orlando Magic in December 2010 and was waived under the NBA amnesty provision in December 2011. He played briefly for the Memphis Grizzlies in 2012 and was out of the NBA permanently by the end of that season.
Crittenton's post-suspension trajectory diverged sharply from Arenas's. He returned to his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 2010. On August 19, 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Julian Jones was killed in a drive-by shooting in Atlanta. Crittenton was charged with the murder later that month and was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on August 25, 2011, while attempting to leave the country. The shooting was unrelated to gambling and was, by the subsequent prosecution theory, an attempted retaliation against the boyfriend of Jones for an unrelated street dispute. Jones, who was not the intended target, was killed. Crittenton pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault in April 2015 to avoid the death penalty under the original murder indictment. He was sentenced to 23 years in Georgia state prison and remains incarcerated in 2026, with scheduled release in approximately 2034.
The Arenas-Crittenton case is the standard NBA reference point for the integrity risks of unsupervised in-flight player gambling. The league response produced a series of formal protocols that have been in force since the 2010 collective bargaining agreement. The protocols include a prohibition on firearms in any NBA facility, a stated cash limit on player-to-player card games (currently 5,000 dollars per session under the 2023 collective bargaining agreement), and a mandatory reporting requirement for any player-to-player financial dispute exceeding 10,000 dollars. The protocols have not eliminated player-level gambling within the league, but they have, in the fifteen years since the 2010 case, prevented any comparable in-locker-room confrontation. The case is taught in every NBA rookie orientation, in every assistant general manager training program, and in the security training curriculum used by the league office for new arena security supervisors.