GINEBRA SNEAKS INTO QUARTERS
On the brink of elimination, Barangay Ginebra San Miguel drew all the breaks it needed and salvaged a record 25th straight PBA playoffs appearance.
Japeth Aguilar fired a trey from the left flank with 1.7 seconds to go and the Kings survived a tough grind against the NLEX Road Warriors, squeezing out a 110-107 win to grab the last slot in the PBA Governors’ Cup Final Eight at the Smart Araneta Coliseum Wednesday night.
The Kings stayed in the hunt for the postseason play as the Kia Carnival topped the Meralco Bolts, 88-85, earlier in the night.
Ginebra and Kia caught up with Meralco and Talk n Text from seventh to 10th with identical 5-6 win-loss marks at the end of the single-round eliminations.
Upon the application of the quotient tiebreak, the Bolts (1.125), the Kings (1.000), the Carnival (0.954) and the Tropang Texters (.929) finished in that order.
“(After Kia won over Meralco), I told the guys huwag natin sayangin ang tsansa. And if we wanna do it, we’ve got to want it,” said Ginebra coach Frankie Lim.
“It came down to making the stops in the end,” added Lim, salvaging a playoffs stint in his maiden conference as Ginebra bench chieftain.
“It’s exciting as it’s something new to me. As a first-time head coach, we’re struggling. We started badly without Japeth and Greg (Slaughter). Pero nakakaahon little by little,” he pointed out.
As the eighth seed, Ginebra must beat top seed Alaska two in a row to make the Final Four.
“We’re facing Alaska, the No. 1 team, and we have to prepare something good. They press a lot and try to limit your sets to certain number of seconds. We have to be ready for that,” said Lim.
The rookie PBA bench chieftain said they scored their first back-to-back wins this conference and avoided elimination as they were able to handle NLEX’s zone defense and beat them in a grind at the finish.
“We did well on their zone, giving us the opportunity to make our three-point shots,” said Lim, mentioning the 13 treys by Johnson, LA Tenorio, Sol Mercado and Korean recruit Kim Jiwan.
The Kings outshot the Road Warriors from afar with the biggest conversion curiously coming from Aguilar in the closing seconds.
The Road Warriors had a chance to force overtime but KG Canaleta missed a three-point try at the buzzer.
A merely 20-percent three-point shooter, Aguilar found himself on the spot from a broken play.
But Aguilar, getting a kickout pass from Johnson, rose to the occasion and the Kings preserved their playoff streak from the 2005 Fiesta Conference. (SB)
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