As late as last season, they said Hayes used to be one of their top shooters during practice. Of course, that never translated in game until this season. I'd still list it like this offensively for the three... Scola, best layups and ability to drive to the basket. Hayes, best passer and most deceptive shot Landry, best finisher and most explosive leap.
http://luis-scola.blog.sohu.com/139478410.html 2009-12-13 | The worst day,cuts, stitches and injuries [rQUOTEr]This wasn’t the best week! We had two tough losses to Dallas and San Antonio, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst thing happened in the following game against Oklahoma City when Etan Thomas, their power forward, unintentionally stuck his finger in my eye and in the process cut by eyebrow pretty bad. My tear duct was almost cut and I ended up with 7 stitches and I couldn’t return to the game. Normally, a player can get stitches and get back into the game, but not in this case because I couldn’t open my eye and where I was cut was a risky spot, so they didn’t let me back in the game. Luckily, we won the game and so the pain of the eye injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been had we lost. I remember several episodes similar to that one over the years…. Above all, I remember having problems with injuries to my teeth. Back in 2003 when we were playing in a practice game in Rosario against Brazil while preparing for the World Championships in Indianapolis, I got absolutely whacked by their well known point guard, Demetrius. It was a very hard foul and his intentions were dubious at best! He pretty much knocked my jaw out of place and may have broken a couple of the teeth. At the time it didn’t hurt much, but it really bothered me the entire trip. A dentist from Rosario sort of set my dental palette where it needed to be and as soon as we got to Mexico for the next games I had an apparatus put in my mouth to sort of hold the most damaged tooth in place to see if we could keep it alive. It really was terrible playing with this brace in my mouth the entire tournament, because the apparatus caused some blisters and they really, really bothered me. To make matters worse, all of the photos showed me with this big metal thing in my mouth! The tooth in question was hanging in there pretty well, but in 2006 in the World Championships of Japan… that changed. We were playing New Zealand in the quarter finals and I was driving in for a layup when my body got tangled up with a defender and I ended up taking a hard fall face first to the floor. The result was knocking out that same tooth that gave me problems in 2003, along with 2-3 others. Manu took a picture of the 4 teeth lying on the court and I think that picture was on his webpage for quite a while after that. On another occasion, they took a picture of me below the belt with “my window open”, but my national team teammates are pretty good guys and they kept this photo hidden, along with many other secret photos, over the past 10 years or so. Over all, these types of hits, cuts and injuries are pretty common for basketball players and they generally aren’t all that serious, although at times they’re pretty painful and occasionally cause you to miss a game or two. A lot of people, both in Houston and Argentina, have spoken about my streak of not missing a NBA game and the possibility of missing one. When they ask me this question, I answer that based on what I consider a missed game, I’ve already missed one when I only played 22 seconds against Oklahoma City. Technically, I haven’t missed a game and the boxscore shows that I played in the game and it also is figured in the cumulative statistics. I don’t put much attention into stats, so I consider this game a missed game for me. Fortunately, I was able to not miss the Clippers game following the injury, so the streak is still alive, for those who love to follow the stats. I don’t put much stake into the streak, but I do hate missing games! I always do my best to be at every game, regardless of how I feel, but I realize that the reality of it is that I will eventually miss a game or two. Hopefully I don’t miss much at all, but it’s bound to happen someday. To be able to play in the Clippers game last week, I had to convince our trainer Keith Jones, the doctor who gave me the stitches, and the head coach. I was able to convince them in this case because about the worst that could have happened to me the other day would be to re-open the cut and have to get the stitches again. There wasn’t a lot of other risk associated with this injury. So, they let me play under the one condition that I wear protective goggles. To be honest, they look and feel terrible. I made a bet with one of my teammates about how fast it would take the Clippers fans to make fun of my goggles. I was barely out of the tunnel and one yelled out “Hey Scola! Where did you leave your helicopter!?” Brilliant…. I had to laugh. Very funny! I hope that next week I don’t have to talk about these goggles any longer and I especially hope that I don’t have to talk about cuts, stitches or injuries the rest of the year! LS[/rQUOTEr]
