HOUSTON (NBA) - The moment of truth has arrived for Luis Scola.

A darling in international basketball for several years, the Olympic-gold medal winning power forward will become the latest Argentinian to play a regular season contest in the NBA when he runs onto the floor at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday with the Houston Rockets.

Under new Houston coach Rick Adelman, the 27-year-old Scola's first game is at one of the league's glamor teams, the Lakers!

Scola, who this summer led Argentina to a runners-up finish at the FIBA Americas Championship and into the Olympics, spoke about his new experience in a video interview on the Houston Chronicle website.

"So far so good," he said.

"There are a lot of changes I've got to make to my game, but it's going well. All I've got to do is work hard and good things will happen."

Just as other players have discovered upon their arrival in America, Scola has had to get used to some big differences.

"The court is different, the rules are different, the players, everything is different," Scola said, "but at the end of the day, it's just basketball."

For a time, it appeared Scola would not test himself in the NBA because the San Antonio Spurs owned his draft rights and couldn't present Scola with a contract offer that was attractive enough.

They traded his rights to Houston this summer, and it appears to have been the ideal move for him.

In Houston, he has the luxury of playing on a Houston team that has an imposing center in Chinese international Yao Ming.

"He makes everyone better and everyone has to focus on him, and that makes a lot of room for everyone else," Scola said.

"Hopefully we can take advantage of it."

Reggie Miller, the Indiana Pacers great who retired in 2005 and now works as a television pundit in the United States, thinks Scola's arrival signals good things for the Rockets.

"They really shored up the power-forward position by picking up Scola, the one position in which they lacked in the past - someone to have Yao's backside," Miller said in USA Today. "Everyone is saying he (Scola) was the best player not playing in the NBA."

Yao says if the Rockets are to be a better team this year, the improvement will have to come on offense.

"We had a pretty good defense last year, we just need to get more scoring," Yao said.

"We need to play faster, and get more people involved in the offense."

Italy's Marco Belinell will make his NBA regular season debut as well with the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday when they host EuroBasket MVP Andrei Kirilenko of Russia and the Utah Jazz.

Also on Tuesday, the NBA champions San Antonio Spurs will host the Portland Trail Blazers.

FIBA