None of us should be taking anything Gilbert Arenas has to say about the game of basketball seriously in the year 2025. He has proven as much on numerous occasions. Too many occasions. Way, way, too many occasions.
No, seriously, why is he still allowed to talk into a microphone, or at a camera?
Anyway, just in case you didn't already know all of this, the 43-year-old engagement-farmer offered a cringe assessment of Karl-Anthony Towns during an episode of the Gil's Arena podcast. The clip is very much NSFW, but you can consume it at your own risk here. Here's what Arenas said while doling out blame for the New York Knicks' Eastern Conference Finals loss to the Indiana Pacers (h/t Shanelle Genai of The Root):
"It’s him, it’s his physical makeup. Long legs, short torso, big a** feet. There’s nothing he can do, he’s built like a whole f*****g b***h. He’s built like a female. Am I saying something wrong? He’s built like a girl. He has girl hips. He’s like a full WNBA player.”
Gilbert Arenas The Misogynist Strikes Again
There are levels to the grotesqueness here.
Most notably, Arenas is attempting to denigrate Towns' physical makeup using a derogative description of a female athlete, or more broadly, a female in general. This is not an instance in which he can claim ignorance, or clumsy word choice. His verbiage and tone are dripping with ingrained prejudice against not just female athletes, but all women. He is saying WNBA players are inferior to NBA players without flat-out using those words, the not-at-all-veiled implication being Towns should be ashamed of looking and moving the way he does, and is somehow incapable of doing his job at the required level because of it.
This is, of course, on par with the incel-ification of Arenas' "media" career. Previous takes have encompassed xenophobic rants, and even similarly bigoted drivel directed at WNBA players. His most viral clips and statements traffic heavily in unfounded, incoherent, discriminatory fanaticism.
The fact that he has a platform at all on which to spew his pathogenic biases is lamentable, a tragic commentary on the larger state of the ever-churning #contentmachine. That we're even talking about this here, right now, in a space reserved for the coolest corners of fandom, is something of a farce. My own consumption of this and the inability to refrain from writing about it, from acknowledging its existence, is part of the problem.
But noxious commentary masquerading as sports analysis deserves to be called out, particularly from serial offenders. Arenas has now shown, on what's basically innumerable occasions, he lacks even the teensiest shreds of human decency. He is, at his most charitable, pandering to lowest-common-denominator B.S., while somehow even managing to do a terrible job of that.
And in case you didn't know this about Karl-Anthony Towns...
He's having a better career than Gilbert Arenas.
Arenas never made it past the second round of the playoffs. Towns was just on consecutive conference finals squads. Arenas was on the Shanghai Sharks by the age of 30, playing for a team that went 10-22, and missed the playoffs. Towns, by all accounts, has plenty of NBA basketball left in him.
On-court accolades and tenures should not be conflated with the right to critique, or talk sports in general. If they were, well, I'd be unemployed. But there's a difference between authentic discussion and debate, and aimless, harmful, telltale, for-spectacle toxicity. Arenas long ago veered into the latter, if he ever even existed above it.
What he says here, and at large, isn't funny or out of context. And given his track record, it's certainly not redeemable. He is a joke of an "analyst", with a voice loud enough to give the appearance of self-importance, but not nearly overpowering enough to effectively hide his own insecurity, or his dearth of basic creativity and insight.