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Carlos Alberto Arroyo Bermudez (born July 30, 1979 in Fajardo, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican professional basketball player. Arroyo is the fifth player from Puerto Rico to play in the NBA and has become arguably the most successful of them in NBA history. He is currently playing for Maccabi Tel Aviv in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Arroyo has played in the NBA, NCAA, and the National Superior Basketball League of Puerto Rico (BSN) with the Cangrejeros de Santurce and Fajardo. Arroyo has also played internationally in Spain. Arroyo was a member of the Puerto Rican National Basketball Team that most notably defeated the United States at the 2004 Olympic Basketball Tournament. He also represented Puerto Rico at the 2006 FIBA World Championship in Japan.

Career

Early years
Arroyo began his career in the National Superior Basketball League of Puerto Rico, where he debuted with the Fajardo Cariduros and subsequently played for the Santurce Crabbers, where he was a teammate of then starting center of the Puerto Rico National Basketball Team, José Ortíz. During his participation with the team the Crabbers won four consecutive national titles in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2003, winning five league championships in six years.
Arroyo also studied in Florida International University from 1998 to 2001, where he played for the campus' team, the Golden Panthers. He was a four-year letterman in the university having completed his baccalaureate and played with the team four years, establishing several records in the team's history. Among this records is the all-time lead in assists scored, having made 459 successful passes. Arroyo is also the only player in Florida International University to have scored more than six hundred points in a single season. He is in the second global position in lifetime scoring, having scored 1,600 points throughout his university career, with an average of 16.0 points per game and 4.6 assists per game over his 100 games.[3] Arroyo was also selected as a member of the Sun Belt Conference's All-Star team on two separate occasions.On January 5, 2007, Florida International University presented a ceremony where Arroyo's university number (30) was symbolically retired to recognize his performance with the institution's team.
After graduating from college, Arroyo was signed by the National Basketball Association's Toronto Raptors for the 2001-02 NBA season, but was released in January 2002. He then played briefly in the Spanish ACB League with TAU Ceramica before being signed by the Denver Nuggets in 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.

Career with the Utah JazZ
With the impending retirement of John Stockton, the Jazz needed a reliable replacement point guard. They envisioned Arroyo as being the player who could fill Stockton's shoes, acquiring him to start the 2002-03 NBA season. Arroyo was then relegated once again to watching from the bench, though head coach Jerry Sloan instructed Arroyo to observe Stockton and back-up guard Mark Jackson, who was also nearing retirement.
Arroyo was given the starting job after Stockton retired and Jackson joined the Houston Rockets before the start of the 2003-04 NBA season. He surprised many Jazz fans, and by November 2003 he was ranked 11th in the league in assists per game. On November 14, he broke the record for most points scored by a Puerto Rican in an NBA game, scoring 30 points against the Minnesota Timberwolves. He finished the season with a career-high average of 12.6 points per game.