According to Jones on the NBA, he very well may be the most marketable person in the NBA. As he explains:

Gilbert Arenas is currently without a sports agent. He’s probably the highest profile player in the league not to have a sports agent. If I were an agent and not a first year law student, he would certainly be the guy I’d try to secure. And not only because he’s going to opt out and become a free agent this summer. Mostly, I’d want to represent him because he is possibly the most marketable player in the game today.

Gilbert Arenas is a sensational prospective client for a number of reasons. He is the rare case of a top NBA player with an organic personality that is very marketable to a broad spectrum of society. Unlike LeBron, Kobe, or D-Wade, the Gilbert you see in commercials, in interviews, and on his blog is not some made up manicured corporate character. With Gilbert, what you see is what you get, and people love that. He’s a natural entertainer, not camera or media shy. On the court, his game backs up his enormous persona. He has a swagger and a reputation for backing up a lot of his big talk with great play. When you combine his sensational play with a unique, relatable personality, you have a guy that corporate sponsors should be clamoring for. What also makes Gilbert unique is the fact that a lot of his superstardom and popularity spawned from the internet. In fact, he might be the NBA’s first internet bread superstar. Bloggers and internet journalists love covering the guy. Plus his NBA.com blog has shown that a good, coherent blog that is actually written by an NBA player can be a very good marketing tool for that particular player.

He goes on to take a very in-depth look at how Gilbert’s rise to super-stardom and how he can continue to build upon that base to become even more marketable. As Mike “Mr. Bullets Forever” Prada would say (or rather, did say), it’s a “nice read” so it’s definitely worth a look.

Bonus Note: Gilbert wasn’t spectacular in the preseason opener against Cleveland last night, but he had a nice buzzer-beater to end the half (obviously), more on that later.