Miami Heat no longer allows its players to play any form of gambling during team flights.
This announcement was made after a gun was in the locker of Washington Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas last month. Arenas said that the presence of the gun in the room was a sign that he lost in a card game and was just for fun. After violating the NBA rules and the Washington DC ordinances, Arenas was placed on an indefinite suspension.
There have already been a number of teams who started to ban gambling on their team flights. The Heat is just the latest of them when on Monday while flying from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, the card games the basketball players were playing were stopped.
Udonis Haslem, one of Heat’s frontliner, said in an interview that the team itself does not have issues caused by gambling. They are just simply being cautious after what happened with the Wizards. They believe that gambling on flight will resume once the Arenas controversy will clear out.
The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers have already announced that they will not ban gambling among their players during team flights. Both teams have more seasoned players than Miami Heat and they do not think that gambling issues can affect their teams’ performances in any way.
