Kwame Brown told The Washington Post that he wasn't ill after Game 3 of the Wizards' series with the Bulls, as the team reported, but was so upset with guard Gilbert Arenas, he feared he would have attacked the guard.

"The thing is, the whole thing stems from Gilbert telling them not to put me in the game. I didn't come to practice because I was going to be a distraction. I was going to slap the [expletive] out of him," Brown told the paper. "I'll admit it, what I did was wrong -- not showing up was wrong -- but I ain't saying what I would've done if I showed up would've been right. Being that I didn't show up I didn't put my hands on nobody. How a teammate, a supposed friend, would go to a coach and tell him don't put me in a game, I would've done something seriously wrong to him."

When told of Brown's accusation, Arenas denied his former teammate's recollection.

"That's the coach's decision. I'm not the coach. I'm not the GM," Arenas told the paper. "If he feels I have that much pull that I could pull him in and out of the game, then I guess he would blame me. If that's his excuse for missing practices -- to blame me -- then I'm strong enough to take the responsibility. But I never told Coach to put him out the game."