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TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO - Say what you will about his play over the last couple months, and most have, but nobody has been harder on Luis Scola than the veteran forward himself.

A pleasant surprise early in the campaign, his first as a member of the Toronto Raptors, the 35-year-old has started to look his age, a result of logging starters minutes for the first time in three seasons and carrying a heavy workload with the national team last summer.

This is where you might expect a professional athlete - particularly one with two decades of experience playing pro basketball - to tell us how he isn't concerned about his slump, how he's been through them before, will go through them again and doesn't give them a second thought, whether or not he actually means it.

Spend any amount of time speaking with or listening to Scola and you'll quickly realize the cliches will be few and far between. The long-haired Argentine is as real as they come. The reality here is that everybody reacts to adversity in different ways and Scola isn't afraid to admit that, despite all his experience, he's still his own toughest critic.

"I usually make a big deal out of things," he admitted following the team's morning shoot around. "So I did at some point overreact a little bit, less than I would have 10 years ago, but it's still [in] my personality and it's just the way I've been playing my whole career."

"I believe that when things go wrong you've got to have some level of concern and worry. That's just the way I approach it."

Scola and head coach Dwane Casey both had their best poker faces on when they chatted with the media ahead of Tuesday's game. Scola insisted he's been feeling a lot better, a lot more confident about his play over the last couple outings. Casey insinuated that he would trot out his regular rotation despite an inferior opponent, the 18-win Brooklyn Nets. They both knew the starting power forward would be getting a night of rest. They're two of the only people who knew, as it turned out, it came as news to most of the team's staffers just prior to tip-off.

After recording 10.3 points and 6.1 rebounds on 47 per cent shooting in 33 games heading into January, Scola is averaging 7.1 and 3.6 on 37 per cent since the calendar turned. Of greater concern, Toronto is allowing an alarming 114.1 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor - the worst mark of any regular rotation player on the team. This begs the obvious question: with Casey threatening to cut the minutes of anyone who isn't performing to par defensively on Tuesday morning, does Scola's night have more to do with preserving his body and mind, or sending a message?

One way or the other, the early returns couldn't have pleased Casey after his team turned in one of their worst opening halves of the season. After 24 minutes, the Raptors returned to the locker room down by 16 points - matching their largest halftime deficit this season - and, as you can imagine, the head coach had a new message.

"It was one we definitely needed," said DeMar DeRozan.

"He used some explicit words," Kyle Lowry added. "Words I can't repeat. Well, I can, but I choose not to."

Sure enough, the Raptors would go on to out-score Brooklyn 62-41 the rest of the way, with DeRozan and Lowry recording 32 of their 48 points in the second half en route to the 104-99 victory, one of their ugliest wins of the campaign.

Casey isn't all that worried about style points at this juncture of the schedule, he's more concerned about fighting through it, or at least getting through it, and taking care of business. These are the dog days of the NBA season and they've hit just about everybody in the league, from the record-setting Golden State Warriors, who lost to the lowly Lakers on Sunday, to the Eastern Conference-leading Cleveland Cavaliers, who were upset by the undermanned Grizzlies Monday. It's been an early "March Madness", Lowry joked.

"It’s a grind," Lowry said. "A lot of people don’t understand the work that goes into it every game. Yes we get paid good money and yes we’re treated very well, but it’s a grind."

"It’s a long season," said Casey. "I understand that. You have some guys who, for a good reason, have a lot of minutes on their bodies but I will say without those guys we wouldn’t be where we are. I thought giving [Scola] a rest tonight was important, I second-guessed it there for a little bit but giving him a rest, we’ll do that periodically down the stretch here."

Scola had played in and started the first 61 games before getting the night off. His replacement, the recently signed Jason Thompson, filled in admirably playing his first real minutes with Toronto. He hit four of his six shots, including the second three-pointer of his eight-year career, and was an active help defender next to Jonas Valanciunas, who had one his worst nights in recent history while struggling to contain Brook Lopez.

Thompson wasn't the cause of the first unit's problems but he's also not the solution, and Scola may not be either, but whether he returns to the lineup on Thursday as a starter or a sub, you haven't seen the last of him in Casey's rotation. With the post-season around the corner the Raptors need Scola, Casey needs Scola, as much for the leadership he brings as anything else. Casey continues to reiterate his message, over and over at the toughest time of the year to get it across. Can't hurt to have a well-regarded 35-year-old veteran around to help him sell it.

"I think players are more receptive to listen to players versus coaches sometimes," Scola said. "And I also believe that sometimes it's good to have other voices, not only the coaches always repeating the same things and sometimes when you combine veteran players with the coaching voices it creates a better result, I believe. Always the coach's voice will be the most important one but sometimes if some players, good veterans that have been around and played big games and went through different situations can compliment that I think it creates a better result."

"We don't tune out the coach but that's the problem that happens when you always make the same mistake, the coach always has to say the same things and it becomes repetitive. It's true what he's saying, it's not just a broken record, it's something that is happening. So the ideal thing would be not [making] the same mistake over and over so you don't have to listen to the coach say the same thing, so he can be correcting stuff but it would be different stuff. But we have been repeating quite a few mistakes and that's something we have to fix as a team, we've got to mature and we've got to find a way to fix those things as a team."