I wasn’t able to completely delve into the rising dissension in the Wizards’ locker room, but I decided to use this forum to go a little deeper than what I could in the newspaper. You already know by now that Brendan Haywood and Gilbert Arenas made some interesting comments after the team suffered a 22-point loss in San Antonio.

Haywood talked about how “ego” is standing in the way of the Wizards’ success this season. He didn’t single out anyone, but he spoke of the need for the players to humble themselves, stop worrying about statistics and glory and play basketball. “Check your ego at the door. Let’s try and win,” Haywood said. “I watch the Celtics, and that’s what they do. Paul Pierce can have 12 in the fourth quarter if they’re up, he don’t care. That’s what we gotta do. Check your ego at the door, move the ball, play some defense.”

But immediately after Haywood was done talking to reporters, Arenas emerged from the shower and basically said that he was going to start going for his if the situation doesn’t get better. It was a rather bizarre because Haywood intentionally yelled his answers so that everyone in the room could hear them. Arenas actually walked in from the shower while Haywood was talking, then returned until Haywood was finished.

Arenas then began talking as if he was going to save the team and that the individual agendas of the Wizards’ eight free agents have been the reason for the team’s failures. I’ll get to his comments about the free agents a little later, but first I want to look deeper into what else he said. He explained why he might have to go on a similar tear as three years ago, when the Wizards started the season 4-9 and had the best record in the Eastern Conference before February.

“I guess you start losing everyone wants to start pointing fingers everywhere else,” Arenas said. “I converted my game to try to get people involved, but at the end of the day, to be honest, this is the same team since three years ago. We added a couple of pieces. You had Roger Mason, now you have Randy Foye. But Dray is Dray, Caron’s Caron, Antawn’s Antawn. It’s basically the same thing, so I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Do I have to go into attack mode like I was two years ago to get us over the hump?’ I hope not. I hope we’re strong enough mentally that we can get over this.”

Arenas cannot honestly believe that this current team — on paper at least — is not better than the one three years ago. And, with the ball in his hands more than it was then, he has had opportunities to take over games but either didn’t (he took just 10 shots in Indiana) or couldn’t (he took 27 shots, missing 18, in a loss to Miami, and could never provide the closing touch in that home loss to Detroit). Since that opening win in Dallas, the Wizards’ best fourth-quarter performance came last week against Cleveland, with Arenas on the bench.

Still, Arenas believes that he has had to scale back his game for the betterment of the team. “I think the only person who actually had to sacrifice was me. Everybody else can just play their game,” Arenas said.

Arenas is averaging 19.3 shot attempts, which leads the team, but has the worst field goal percentage of the starters at 39 percent. Through three quarters on Saturday, he had taken 18 shots — the same as Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison combined. “Before, I would’ve taken 27 shots on a night like this to keep us in the game,” Arenas said. “But I’m not trying to revert to that. Before, I’d look at Eddie and he’d say, ‘Take over the game.’ But I’ve got trust in these guys that eventually Randy’s going to start hitting shots. He’s coming off of injury. That Caron’s going to start catching and shooting, that we’ll start getting production out of Dray again.”

“Like I told Twan, couple more games before I just say, ‘Hey, I’m going to have to carry you guys on my back,’ ” Arenas said.

As I wrote in my story for the paper, it’s debatable whether Arenas is still capable of a similar performance when he is still trying to regain his form and confidence after missing nearly two seasons after three left knee surgeries. He clearly has some rust to work out before he is back to what he once was. But the part of Arenas’s interview that was truly strange was when he spoke about the “hidden agendas” on the team.

“Everybody needs to get on the same level, that’s all. Everyone’s got their own individual goals, I guess. Hidden agendas. You can’t win like that,” he said. “I’ve never been on a team where you have eight free agents next year. I’ve never played on a team like that. I’ve never seen it turn out well. Sometimes it works out for the best because everybody’s hungry and everybody’s fighting. Sometimes it works out for the worst when everybody’s out for their own.”

Huh? The eight free agents have hidden agendas?

Haywood is the only free agent who has played every game this season, but it’s not like rebounding and blocking shots is a disruption. Mike Miller has been playing with one arm because he’s a competitor. Randy Foye has been hurt and received limited minutes of late. Fabricio Oberto is the ultimate team player, so much so that Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich said the guy is going to heaven when he dies. Earl Boykins has played three games. Dominic McGuire doesn’t play. And Mike James and Javaris Crittenton are both out injured.

I’ll admit that having several players looking for contracts could be a distraction, but I have a hard time seeing any of those guys as the problem right now. It’s not like any of them resurrected old nicknames, are trying to get a million followers on Twitter or just established Web sites to promote their all-star campaigns.

Look, Arenas is free to market himself in whatever manner he pleases — as Angry Gil, Silent Gil, Agent Zero, Hibachi, etc. — but the timing of all this seems pretty bad with the season slipping. He really needs to just play basketball and stop worrying about the ancillary stuff. Three and nine should lead to a change in priorities. Ultimate stardom comes with wins.

The ugliness continued for the Wizards Saturday night against the Spurs. And based on the scenes Michael Lee witnessed during Washington’s 106-84 loss to San Antonio, it’s not going to get better any time soon. All of this ended too late to make many dead-tree versions of The Post (thank you, 8:30 start) but Mr. Lee covers it in his postgame thoughts.

UPDATE: NBA.com posted some comments made by Gilbert Arenas and Brendan Haywood after the game, which Mr. Lee will cover in his off-day story.

Here’s the game story from Mike Jones of The Washington Times. And the short and not-so-sweet observations from Bullets Forever.

The Wizards will possibly be without two starters when they welcome back Eddie Jordan on Tuesday. The team is still waiting on the results of MRIs on Mike Miller’s right calf and Caron Butler’s right foot. Butler didn’t practice on Monday and is questionable after playing with through the injury the past two weeks.

Coach Flip Saunders said the pain became unbearable in the past week. “He decided go to an MRI to see where it’s at. It swelled up a little bit yesterday so we’ll know more this afternoon. I know that he had trouble being able to push off in San Antonio. He just couldn’t get anything going. We thought it would be better to try to see where it’s at and try to take care of it.”

Miller will definitely be out for an extended period of time after injuring his calf in San Antonio. Miller was on crutches, dressed in warm-ups, and wearing a New York Yankees championship cap after practice. As he walked by reporters, Miller joked, “I’m going to play tomorrow.”

When asked how he was going to determine a start lineup against the Philadelphia 76ers, Saunders joked, “Rock, paper, scissors.” But he later said that Nick Young will start either way. Saunders is still trying to decide whether he will start Dominic McGuire at small forward, have Randy Foye at shooting guard and Young at small forward, or even start Fabricio Oberto or Andray Blatche and play Antawn Jamison at small forward.

Saunders said he would wait until Tuesday to make a decision on Butler, hoping that the Wizards’ late afternoon shootaround would provide him some extra rest.

Young had fallen out of favor with Saunders, especially after forgetting a play that was called for him in Miami. He will go from inactive against the Spurs to starting against 76ers, an incredible turnaround, but somewhat understandable, given the Wizards’ constant injury woes.

“He’s really had very good practices,” Saunders said. Being inactive ‘the last game, more than anything, is because of the situation. We knew Caron was a little bit sore. If something happened to him and he couldn’t go, we wanted to have a bigger body. But he’s had good practices the last week.”

What does he have to do to stay on the floor? “Just consistency, play within himself, play hard and try to cut down on mental mistakes but still try to stay aggressive offensively.”

There appears that there is some confusion over the dissension within the Wizards. It certainly is there, but there is no rift between Gilbert Arenas and Brendan Haywood. Their comments were not directed toward each other, although some have inferred that. This won’t evolve into some Hayood-Etan Thomas feud.

Arenas spoke with reporters after practice for the first time since the regular season began. I asked him if players on the team trust one another and he offered up this doozy: “Most of us feel we’re confident in each other on the floor and there are a few that don’t. I have no idea,” he said. “But for the most part, we all get a long. There are, what, 15 players on the team? Fourteen do.”

He may have cleared up that comment a few minutes later when asked who was responsible for healing the rift on the team. “Me and Antawn. That’s our jobs,” Arenas said. “But at the end of the day, if 15 players don’t want to go and it’s only 14, you’ve seen Remember the Titans. It’s the same thing, we’ve just got to play.”

Now, the Wizards have a tri-captain system with Arenas, Jamison and Butler. So it was obvious that Arenas left someone out of the leadership mix. I’ve mentioned the problems that Arenas and Butler have had playing with each other for most of this funk, but it is really starting to heat up even more.

When Arenas was asked if Butler was also part of the equation to resolve some of the problems with the team chemistry, he smiled, leaned in and asked, “Come again?”

Is Caron also a part of that?

“Yeah,” he said.

Arenas also said that he thought the team would be 13-2 this month. He said he even made a bet with assistant coach Sam Cassell. He’s had to pay up after each loss. “It’s kinda frustrating because me and Sam had a little bet thing going on,” he said. “Now I’m kinda down in a hole. Every time we lose a game that we weren’t supposed to lose, I owe a hundred dollars to the team.”

The Wizards need to turn it around soon. Right now, Arenas is on pace cough up $6,100.

I wanted to give you guys an update on what happened since my last blog post. The drama with these Wizards has to be charted in real time, it seems. I spoke with Caron Butler shortly after I wrote about how Gilbert Arenas said that 14 of the 15 players on the team get along and two of the three captains — Arenas and Antawn Jamison — would help the team heal the rifts in the locker room.

Butler, one of the team’s three captains, was shocked to hear about Arenas’s comments and refused to say anything in retaliation. He told me that he has no problems with anyone on the team and understood that guys start pointing fingers when things go poorly.

“It’s crazy, losing and everything. Man, it’s tough,” he said, “but in the midst of all of this, we’ve got to remain positive. That’s all you can do. That’s what I’m going to do. You got to find the silver lining in every situation. Collectively, we got to find a way to win games and work hard in practice. We’ll see what happens.”

Shortly thereafter, Butler called Arenas to discuss the comments that Arenas had made to reporters that afternoon. The conversation eventually grew into a discussion about how the team can get better, according to Butler and Arenas, who called me a few hours ago to confirm the talk. After the phone call, Butler texted me to tell me that the two had resolved their differences and added, “I never had a problem with him.”

Both guys made it clear to me that they want to help this team to get back on the right track and start winning again. We’ll see if they can get it together. The Wizards really need them to.

In his conversation with reporters, earlier this afternoon, Arenas explained the reasons why the Wizards have been unable to click offensively. He said Flip Saunders’s system is not the problem.

“It’s not difficult to pick up the offense. It’s difficult to get the guys the ball without killing the rest of the team,” Arenas said. “If I want to get Antawn off, just like I did in Cleveland, I just do pick-and-roll. If I want to get Randy the ball, I just call two plays. If I need Mike Miller to shoot, I call the play. Certain people just need certain plays.

“That’s the easy part, but they’re telling me to be in attack mode while getting them the ball,” Arenas said. “They want me to attack more than I already am. They say if I go and do what I do, everybody will score easy. But if I attack all the time, I’m going to take away from everybody else. It’s not like Chris Paul in his offense where he is the offense just pick-and-rolling everything. It’s different. But, like I say, Antawn, he comes back and he has [31 points] because I know what he needs because I’ve been playing with him the longest: pick-and-roll. Caron, he needs isos. But how do I get him the ball without cutting other players out? That’s been the problem.”

When you hear stuff like that, you realize that it might be too much to expect Arenas and Butler to have everything figured out when they’ve only played together 11 games this season. Arenas really is like adding a new piece since he’s been out the past two seasons. And, in that time, Butler got accustomed to being one of the primary go-to-guys with Jamison. They aren’t the same players they were when they last played regularly. These are just the truly agonizing growing pains of getting re-acclimated with one another.

Butler will be a game-time decision on Tuesday after an MRI showed no structural damage on the right ankle injury that has been causing him problems the past week. Mike Miller’s MRI showed that he has a strained right calf muscle and will miss the next three to six weeks.

“It does hurt because when he came off that screen, he made everything happen,” Arenas said. “Either he’d get a wide-open jumper, or he’d drive or kick or drove and hit Brendan [Haywood]. But Randy can do the same thing, and somebody else just has to step up.”

Randy Foye and Arenas had developed some good chemistry in the first few games, but Foye has had difficulty regaining his rhythm after missing nearly a week with a sprained right ankle. “He can’t push off the way he wants. That’s why I just said I need him to hurry up and get back to where he was in the beginning.”

Leave it to Jamison to serve as the voice of reason for this bumpy start to the season. “It’s only 12 games into the season. If the season was based on what happened the first 12 games, then okay, it’s a done deal. But 82 games, we still got a long way to go,” he said. “We’ve been in this situation before. The most important this not to let this linger any longer to the point that its really hard to get out of the win-loss column. It’s a sense of urgency already. I hope it can be a good holiday weekend for us, get a little turkey and gain some weight.”

By Michael Lee  |  November 23, 2009; 10:56 PM ET