From the files of "Being An NBA Player Can Be Harder Than It Looks"...

While most of his teammates celebrated the win over the Clippers on Wednesday night and prepared to fly an hour or so to San Francisco in advance of tonight's game at Golden State, Hawks C Zaza Pachulia had other things to deal with, like continuing the process of obtaining his permanent green card.

Pachulia, as an international player, has had to deal with passport challenges ever since he joined the NBA in 2003. Most years he is able to take care of it before the season starts, but at times it has affected him during play, as in 2007-08 when he had to sit out a Hawks road trip to Toronto because of complications with his passport.

Getting a permanent visa is a process that takes some time (my co-worker Ben, who runs the Thrashers site and is Canadian, estimates it will end up taking around six months to get his), and apparently requires you to be incredibly flexible. Zaza had an appointment for an interview scheduled for Thursday, and the fact that the Hawks were in the midst of a trip out to the West Coast mattered little.

So, Big Z did what he had to do. Directly after the Clippers game, Pachulia headed straight for LAX, where he caught a 1:00 am flight back to Atlanta. Arriving at 9:30 Thursday morning, he went straight to the office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services in Atlanta to finish the process. Once it was done it was right back to the road, as he" caught the first available flight to San Francisco and arrived last night to rejoin the Hawks less than 24 hours before tonight's tip-off. Yowsa.

By phone this afternoon, a slightly weary Pachulia talked about what an important moment this was for him:

"Getting this card means a lot to me," he said. "I am lucky to have it - I know a lot of people have to wait years and years to make something like this happen, so I feel very fortunate. It's the dream of anyone who is from another country but who wants to work in the United States to have a green card, and for me, as someone who sees his future and his family's future in the US, this is a really big step.

"As an NBA player, I am used to traveling a lot, but flying something like 10 of the last 24 hours, it reminds me of going back to Europe. To do something like that, especially in the middle of a road trip, proves just how important this is to me."

All of which is to say that if it takes ZP a few minutes to get into the swing of things tonight, I for one will cut the guy a little slack. I don't expect him to need it though, as he has performed pretty admirably in place of Al Horford while Horford rehabs his injured knee.

Catch Z and his teammates on the late show tonight, as they try to take the rubber game of the three-game trip against the Warriors at 10:30 ET on SportSouth.