While the team struggles, it appears as though the traditionally extroverted Arenas has effectively gone into hiding. Not out of shame though, nor necessarily obligation. Perhaps the man has simply just changed. Nobody truly knows what's gone through his head, nor will we ever know - unless he tells.
"Because he hasn't said anything notable as of late to the media or on his blog, it feeds the perception that he's not involved with the team," says Whitacre. "In reality, he's still there just as much as before, he's just taking more of a behind-the-scenes role with the team since he's not on the court right now."
Over the course of the first half of this season, Arenas, through his ghostwriter, has posted just once, nearly three months ago.
So how then, does a personality - once prided for its energy and unrelenting pursuit of attention - adapt out of the spotlight? Like an overworked child actor, the legacy of The Gilbert Arenas Brand grew at such an exponential rate that it had no choice but to implode upon itself like a dying star, just three years removed from having conceived an entirely new form of athlete-fan connectivity.
Now the man with no choice but to begrudgingly swap swag for suits sits dormant, not just injured, but off of relevant's radar entirely.
"At the beginning of the season, Gilbert was always around," said Mobley. "He was on the practice court, he was in the locker room, and he would conduct his own personal shootaround on the court prior to the games. Then, about two weeks (in), he disappeared altogether, which not coincidentally, was related to him making comments about being skeptical about coming back to a team with such a dismal record."
It's hard to blame Gilbert Arenas for embracing the written means through which he interacted with millions of basketball fans, but it's even harder to imagine just how good he could have been if, like any other boring NBA personality, he focused solely on playing or getting healthy. He was a man of the people, but even more, he was a big kid chatting globally with others who adored everything he represented.
"Every player has their own hobbies that they pursue during their downtime, Gilbert's hobby just happens to be read by thousands of people," says Whitacre.
With unbridled character and the skill to match, Arenas was the perfect weapon for a billion dollar enterprise hungry to usher in a new online media platform. The blog was simply the guise under which it operated and the league knew that Arenas - a player addicted to his underdog status and anything that got people talking - would be game.
In the two and a half years since the initial launch, the league has relished the endless possibility, and, like a sacrificial gesture to the sporting Gods, Arenas was repeatedly drained of all quirk, flair or anything marketable about him.
Now, like a figmet of our imagination, visions of Arenas going toe to toe with LeBron James in the Eastern Conference quarter-finals are so far from a reality that it's frightening - did it ever really happen? The man whose offensive gifts were just starting to break into the public conscious, was he ever even real?
For years we've waited for a figure like Gilbert Arenas to break the mold of the traditional sports scene, someone who gave us not just a behind the scenes look at the NBA, but a behind the scenes look at themselves and superstardom in general. We had it briefly and now it's gone.
When all is said and done, though, maybe this was inevitable. Maybe the obsession (from both him and us), maybe the more-blogs-posted-than-games-played means that we weren't quite ready for it. And with that we see the unfortunate passing of Agent Zero's prominence, an experiment failed and tossed by the wayside while the NBA's marketing machine powers on, hungry for its next lamb.
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