Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas has given up his popular internet blog so that he can focus on playing this season.

"I'm 27 now. I'm not the entertainer anymore," Arenas told the media on Monday. "I wouldn't be here today if there wasn't a big fine. I don't feel like speaking anymore. I just want to go out there and play.

"If I'm not going to get fined, I don't think you're going to hear me again. I don't have a blog. I don't have a tweeter. When I was entertaining, all you guys focused on was my words. Now I'd rather you just focus on my basketball."

Arenas didn't say much about the knee injuries that robbed him of a majority of the last two seasons. However, he did stand by recent comments made to the Washington Times in which he blamed the team for rushing him back in prior rehabs.

Wizards team president Ernie Grunfeld says that the team's relationship with star guard Gilbert Arenas is "strong."

Arenas publicly criticized the team last week for his failed comebacks the past two seasons.

"I talked to Gilbert about the situation, and obviously you get frustrated when things aren't going well, but the bottom line is he's healthy now. This is his life and what he loves to do," Grunfeld told the Washington Times.

The Wizards were 19-63 last season, while Arenas missed 80 games.

"Our relationship is strong. He has a very competitive nature," Grunfeld added. "This is my seventh year with Gilbert. He was the first guy I signed when I first got here. He was only 19 years old at the time. I've seen a great change in him over the years. ... I haven't seen him this excited in a very, very long time. He's excited about what's going on. He's about the environment; he's ready to get going."

Wizards coach Flip Saunders believes that Gilbert Arenas will be as good as he was before knee issues caused him to miss most of the last two seasons.

Saunders added that he knows he's going to butt heads with his star guard at times, something he's prepared for.

"He expresses opinions," Saunders told the Associated Press on Tuesday. "We're not going to agree a lot. That's part of the process as you go through. But when it comes down to it, you have to understand one thing. When I say we're going to play a certain way, that's the way we're going to play, whether you like it or not. He's starting to understand those things."

Washington went 19-63 last season, but Saunders came to town with a four-year, $18 million contract because he feels they are close to contending.

"I don't think there's any reason we shouldn't be able to compete with the elite teams in the East -- or in the league for that matter," said Saunders.

Saunders has already put his own stamp on the team, scraping Eddie Jordan's Princeton-style offense in favor of a system that will allow Arenas to make plays.

"He's in a totally different situation. He's going to have the ball in his hands 80 percent of the time. He's going to make decisions," the coach added. "He has a great opportunity to really improve a lot."

Wizards forward Antawn Jamison says that the team is talking about contending for a title this season.

"I've been around here for six years and championship talk wasn't a norm around our locker room. That's all we're talking about now," Jamison told the Washington Post. "If we stay healthy, I think we can compete with the upper echelon of the NBA."

That's certainly bold talk coming from a team that won just 19 games last season.

"I don't care," Jamison added. "What you mean raising the bar too high? We won 19 games last year and I'll be honest with you, we didn't have a lot of our horses. But I don't have anything else to play for. I'm not going to sit here and sugar coat things because it's not the right thing to say. I believe it.

"I believe playing the game the right way and staying healthy, we can compete with Boston, we can compete with Cleveland and Orlando and if you can compete with those teams, you can put yourself in that category as far as teams that can contend for a championship."

Gilbert Arenas is back to full strength thanks to trainer Tim Glover.

"Nobody could guard me before, and can't nobody guard me now," Arenas told The Washington Times. "If I hadn't come up here, I'd be starting off the season with a 95 percent chance that I'd be sitting out more games. ... [Mr. Grover] saved my career."

The Wizards star has had three surgeries on his left knee. To a degree, Arenas blames the club for failed comebacks in each of the last two seasons.

"They handled me going off what they had seen before and said, 'You can't lift weights because you might chip a bone,' " Arenas said. "That's their experience. Everybody has theirs. It took me two years to realize that I was a case study. Ultimately, I can prove I can get hurt, sit out two years and come back and be as good as I was."

A person close to Michael Jordan says that the legendary player regrets his time in Washington.

Jordan joined Washington's front office and returned for his third stint as a player at the tail end of his career.

"I think Michael feels very bad about the two years he spent playing here," Jordan's Washington-based representative, Curtis Polk, told the Washington Post. "It's not something he wants out here, but obviously, it's part of history."

Jordan has rarely spoken about his final two seasons with the Wizards.

The Wizards held the fifth overall selection in the 2009 NBA Draft, but were not expecting Ricky Rubio to fall to them and so they decided to get multiple players in return that can contribute immediately.

Even if they held the pick, Ernie Grunfeld had reservations about selecting Rubio.

Grunfeld was well aware of the difficulty in getting Rubio out of his outlandish buyout and into an NBA uniform this season, according to a source that spoke with the Washington Post.

Rubio's agent Dan Fegan also expressed concerns about how Rubio would play in a backcourt that also had Gilbert Arenas in it.