Barangay Ginebra has just played a "special game" against San Miguel Beer and is now on the brink of booking a return trip to the PBA Governors Cup finals.
How to do a fitting repeat, or something close to it, now gnaws at the Gin Kings when they tackle the Beermen anew Sunday in what could be a close-out game to their semifinal series at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
Gametime is at 7:30 p.m. with Ginebra aiming to notch the series' first back-to-back wins and join defending champion TNT in the championship duel.
The Kings took a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven semis following a 121-92 victory last Friday in a game where coach Tim Cone's charges shot 54.8 percent from the field, issued 31 assists and committed only six turnovers.
"Thirty-one against six, that's really, really good. It's not something you're gonna do every night and tonight we were able to do it," noted Cone after the game that saw his team run roughshod over a powerhouse SMB side to lead by as many as 31 points.
"Hopefully, we could come up close to doing that in the next game," added Cone. "It's not gonna be something we regularly do, but when we do we play a special game and tonight we played a special game and that was reflected in the score."
Still, Cone is the first to admit that doing a reprise is easier said than done. "Again, can we follow it up? That's the big question," he quickly pointed out. "It's really hard to follow it up against a team like San Miguel."
Cone has good reason to be wary of SMB since the latter has shown its capability to rebound from a loss each of the two previous times it went down in the series.
"That's why it's so hard in the playoffs," reasoned Cone. "I mean, I keep telling our team that the hardest win in a playoff is after you've won. That's the hardest because the other team is gonna come back with adjustments, with more fire, a different mindset, like we did today, we had a different mindset.
"They're gonna come back with that. If there are two teams that are fairly equal, you're gonna have a series like this."
The key for Ginebra, according to Cone, is to play to its main strength and keep making stops versus SMB, which got harassed into a 44.2 percent shooting and 19 turnovers just two days removed from a cruising 131-121 win in Game 4.
"They're just so gifted, offensively, and so they play to their strength and their strength is they're a great offensive team and so they play there," said Cone.
"We'd like to think we're more of a defensive team and that's where our strength is. When we go out there and try to play their game, we're gonna find ourselves in trouble and that's what happened in Game 4."
What should affect SMB's bid to equalize is the dubious status of starting point guard Jericho Cruz, who suffered a right ankle sprain early in the fourth quarter of Game 5. (NC)
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