Is Purefoods starting their rise to a 5th straight title? Purefoods 90 – Blackwater 82 Purefoods won. Wow, what a big surprise. Really, though. If there’s anything that was unexpected, it’s that they only won by eight points. Early in the conference, the Hotshots didn’t look like the championship squad that they are. They were struggling. They were battling an OKC amount of injuries. And what a lot of us were thinking was: “ganyan naman sila lagi eh. Bad start pero magch-champion pa din.” I was able to talk to Coach Richard del Rosario about it. He admitted that they were not in panic mode because experience has trained them for this situation. But he also said that they can’t embrace their position and take the past for granted.As expected, Purefoods was able to flip the switch and begin their ascent. They’ve won three of their last four games. While that is a pretty impressive turnaround, what makes me look up to this team is how hungry they stay despite all their recent success. They don’t get contented until they’ve won the next title. When they finally scored their first win at the expense of Globalport, reports waited for Coach Tim Cone for the post-game press conference. Oddly, it was taking him such a long time. He’d usually head straight there after the buzzer. This time was different. After around 10 minutes, Coach Tim finally lunged out of the dug-out, briskly walking towards the press room. “It totally slipped out of my mind. It felt like we lost,” he explained. Purefoods was down that whole game before the came back and stole the W in fading minutes of the fourth. Sure they won. But Coach Tim knew there was something more. After they defeated Blackwater, we were trying to catch Assistant Coach Jason Webb for a quick interview. It was 15 minutes after the game, the players were leaving already so I thought it was safe to look for Coach Jason in the dug out. I was wrong. There was a coaches meeting led by what looked like an upset Tim Cone. Coach Jason signalled to me, saying “mamaya na” then used his mouth to point at his head coach. Along the hallways of Araneta, sportswriters commonly crowd players and coach for interviews. Coach Tim and Marc Pingris were interviewed separately but they made the same point: Purefoods needed to connect and play better together. They said that coming off a win. Coming off back-to-back wins. This attitude, it explains why Purefoods has won the last four championships in the PBA. It reasons out why we live in the Purefoods/San Mig Coffee era of Philippine basketball. It’s makes sense out of why you can’t count this team out even if they start the conference bad. It rationalizes our utter instinct that they will win it all again this conference. Purefoods can win a grand grand slam – three straight grand slams – and they’d still remain hungry. That separates a winning team from champion squad. (c) Slam Philippines
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 07:45:21 +0000
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