When the word officially, mercifully, came down that Ernie Grunfeld’s reign over the Washington Wizards was over, my mind immediately drifted to two nights in 2010. Two nights when Grunfeld’s emotions couldn’t have been at more opposing ends. Two nights that represented what he had to strip down and eventually what gave him the chance to rebuild.



My phone rang late in the evening of Jan. 6 that year. It was Gilbert Arenas’s 28th birthday but there was no celebration because then-Commissioner David Stern, upset over Arenas’s flippant comments and behavior the night before in Philadelphia, decided to suspend for the remainder of the season the player to whom Grunfeld latched the early part of his tenure in Washington.



Arenas had brought guns to the locker room following a heated confrontation with teammate Javaris Crittenton — roughly a month after Wizards’ patriarch Abe Pollin died from brain cancer — and uncertainty...