Carlos Arroyo
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Carlos Arroyo (born July 30, 1979 in Fajardo, Puerto Rico) is an NBA basketball player who plays point guard for the Detroit Pistons. In less than five seasons, Arroyo has become arguably the most successful Puerto Rican basketball player in NBA history.
Arroyo played in the Puerto Rican Basketball League for the Cangrejeros de Santurce, where he was a teammate of legendary Puerto Rican player Jose Ortiz. He and Ortiz helped the Cangrejeros to four consecutive titles in the late 1990s, and to five titles in six years.
A four-year letterman at Florida International University from 1998-2001, Arroyo was the school's second player ever to top 1,600 points, averaging 16.0 points and 4.6 assists over his 100 collegiate games. After graduating from FIU, Arroyo was signed by the NBA's Toronto Raptors for the 2001-2002 NBA season, but was released on January, 2002. He then played briefly in Spain before being signed by the Denver Nuggets on March of the same year. He saw limited action with those two teams, playing seventeen games with the Raptors and twenty with the Nuggets before his initial NBA season was over. He only played an average of 9.7 minutes per game during those thirty seven games where he saw action.
With the impending retirement of John Stockton, the Jazz needed a reliable, replacement point guard on their team. They envisioned Arroyo as being the player who could substitute Stockton, and they traded for him before the start of the 2002-2003 NBA season. Arroyo was then relegated once again to watching games from the bench most of the season, but head coach Jerry Sloan and his team of assistants instructed Arroyo to observe Stockton and back-up guard Mark Jackson, who was also nearing retirement.
Arroyo was given the starting job at his position after Stockton retired and Jackson joined the Houston Rockets before the start of the 2003-2004 season. He surprised many Utah Jazz fans, qualifying among the top twenty players in the NBA for his first season there in various categories: By November of 2003, he was ranked eleventh in assists per game, and in assists per 48 minutes played. He also ranked sixteenth in two other categories. On November 14, he broke the record for the most points scored by a Puerto Rican in an NBA game, scoring 30 points against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
At Utah, his per game numbers were widely expected to arise as his career progresses, because he had been given much more playing time each game as a result of Stockton and Jackson's retirements. Also, Arroyo had a great performance on the 2004 Olympic Games, where he led Puerto Rico to a stunning victory over the Dream Team of the United States.
However, during the 2004-2005 NBA season, Arroyo had several disputes with Utah's coach Jerry Sloan. Arroyo lost his starting postion and was eventually relegated to the bench. In January of 2005, Arroyo was traded to the Detroit Pistons for veteran center Elden Campbell.
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See also
External Links
Official Website (http://www.carlosarroyo.com)
Categories: 1979 births | 2004 Puerto Rican National Basketball Team | BSN players | Detroit Pistons players | Toronto Raptors players | Utah Jazz players | Puerto Rican people | Puerto Rican sportspeople | Olympic competitors for Puerto Rico | Puerto Rican basketball players | Puerto Rican Olympians