Luis Scola

Topics: Argentine basketball players, Olympic basketball players of Argentina, Olympic gold medalists for Argentina, Spanish-Argentines

Luis Alberto Scola Balvoa (born April 30 1980 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian professional basketball player. The 2.06 m (6 ft 9 in) power forward for the Argentine National Basketball Team is currently signed with the NBA's Houston Rockets. He formerly was a star with the ACB's TAU Ceramica. He has dual citizenship: Argentine and Spanish.

Scola started in Buenos Aires' Ferrocarril Oeste youth teams, where he also made his professional debut in the 1996-97 season. After 1997-98, he moved to Spain to help second division Cabitel Gijon achieve promotion. He then signed with TAU Ceramica but stayed with Gijon through the 1999-2000 season, before moving to TAU, where he played for seven seasons.

In the summer of 2005, the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA (who drafted Scola in 2002) attempted to negotiate with TAU to buy out his contract, but after initially throwing around numbers as high as $15 million, TAU eventually settled on a still high number of over 3 million dollars for the contract, which made it difficult for Scola to join fellow Argentina national team member Manu Ginobili in San Antonio because of the NBA's rule which limits teams to paying $500,000 of a player's buyout. Scola would have been responsible for paying TAU the remaining $2.5 million. When the deal to buy out Scola's contract fell through, the Spurs instead signed an Argentine teammate and friend of Scola's Fabricio Oberto.