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I feel like that's still getting off reaaallly easy, I can see those 400 hours of community service really cutting in to his basketball preparation this summer....

 

That 400 hours will easily be spread throughout the season doing community services that NBA players always do.

 

I'm curious what the Wizards will do now. Termination of his contract appears unlikely now. If he had been in jail when training camp was going on, that would have been a whole other story.

While this is a short term victory for the Players Union, I think it will have a detrimental effect for them long term. What's the point of a Morals Clause in a Standard Player Contract if you can't terminate it even if the player is convicted of a felony on team property? I think that's something Stern will want to remedy when the Lockout commences summer of 2011. I have a feeling that when that Lockout is over, it will be explicitly written into the CBA and a lot easier for a team to terminate a player over illegal activity even if it's just a misdemeanor.

 

The Wizards already said they would take back Gilbert once he got done with this sentence.

 

Under the current CBA, you're almost certainly correct. It would take a seriously twisted misdemeanor offense (probably sexual in nature) to convince an arbitrator to terminate the contract.

I think the Wizards should be able to terminate his contract now, and a whole slew of other players fall in the same boat (Sprewell, Patterson, Jackson, Artest, etc.). I imagine Stern is ticked over the Arenas incident as he was over some of the above-mentioned figures.

I'm curious what Stern and company intend to do about it in the next CBA. The whole thing is going to get rewritten, and I think Stern is keeping a list of things he wants to include. Shorter contracts, hard caps, lower max salaries, and I bet he's got moral clause enforcement on that list. I'd be surprised if he didn't make it a point to give owners more leeway to terminate a contract and will spell it out quite explicitly in the new CBA.

 

I think the Wiz will keep him despite the temptation to terminate his contract. They already cleared a ton of cap space by trading Butler and Jamison and Arenas could help next year. The Wiz could use him because they suck now.