Last Sunday, with little fanfare about the night’s event, 13,000 fans trooped to the Araneta Coliseum to watch an early season game between Ginebra and Purefoods (and perhaps, the matchup between the returning Mark Caguioa and James Yap). They didn’t seem to mind the dark cloud looming over the league with the Wynne Arboleda incident, or the mushrooming negative sentiment all over the Internet against the league after Powerade Team Pilipinas’ debacle in the Fiba-Asia Championship.

The people who attended the game were treated to an exciting ball game by the league’s two most popular teams (a 2008 SWS survey found that Ginebra had the biggest following in Luzon, but fans from the Visayas and Mindanao preferred Purefoods). It was a fun, action-packed 48 minutes, with the players going hard and making big plays. Ginebra coach Jong Uichico masterfully lured Purefoods’ Ryan Gregorio into playing small-ball with a junk zone defense, neutralizing the Giants’ size advantage. Purefoods almost won anyway—does any other PBA team win in spite of its coach?—behind James Yap’s game-long brilliance and Peter June Simon’s balls of steel. But Ginebra came through, behind big plays from Jayjay Helterbrand, Willie Wilson (who had a career game outplaying Kerby Raymundo), and Ronald Tubid, who was just plain electric throughout the whole second half while hamming it up for the crowd.

It’s a popular chorus that the PBA is a dying league, for so many reasons. It usually comes from people who were never big fans of the league in the first place, or who haven’t been in a while, or who do not know what they’re talking about. A few months ago, I argued that the perception that PBA players play passionless ball (compared to, say, NBA players) is probably not true, or at least, fair. Last year, former Solar Sports executive Jude Turcuato pointed out that PBA viewership actually dwarfs that of the UAAP.

Last Sunday, the PBA was alive and well and beaming and vibrant. A friend of mine wrote about how her husband (a Ginebra fan) took their five-year old to the game, and the boy had a helluva time. It’s been a good opening week for the league, the Wynne incident notwithstanding.

Some more basketball related thoughts about the first week of the new season:

• Two teams have made it to the semifinals of the last two All-Filipino tournaments, and no one in the media ever talks about them as favorites, even when they’ve shown that their franchises can compete consistently. Can you guess which teams these are?


• There’s a coach active in the PBA who has led his team to the finals of the last three All-Filipino tournaments he’s coached full-time. I was surprised when I did my research on this. Can you guess which coach this is?


• I know San Miguel has a loaded lineup and they’re media favorites, blah, blah, blah… but they’re such meh team to me. I don’t particularly enjoy watching them play, unless Bonbon Custodio is on the court.


• I touched on this the other night on Twitter while watching the Smart Gilas-Burger King game, but I have a theory that Chris Tiu is playing shooting guard for the team almost out of necessity. Rajko Toroman prefers to have two ballhandlers and playmakers on the court at all times, and Tiu’s backup, JR Cawaling, is neither a good ballhandler nor playmaker. The downside? Tiu’s been getting killed by the PBA shooting guards he’s been taking, and it’s only going to get worse.


• Coke. What a mess. They have mismatched personnel, and their “brain trust” of Bo Perasol and Kenneth Duremdes look lost out there. They don’t have an identity either; they’ve been trying to run and press—Perasol’s M.O. since he was coaching Air 21—but their best players, Asi Taulava and Dennis Espino, prefer to walk it up. They also have two guards, Alex Cabagnot and Chris Ross, who both need the ball in their hands to be effective.


• How long would it take before Burger King sells Ronjay Buenafe to the highest bidder?


• I don’t want to condone Barako Bull management’s player-selling ways, but it’s a lot of fun to watch their players—cult heroes and former benchwarmers—getting burn they wouldn’t otherwise get. How about that Magnum Membrere explosion? I enjoyed that. That was nice.


• Rain or Shine. I dunno. What do you think?


• The two teams who’ve been crashing the semis? Alaska and Sta. Lucia.


• The coach who’s a mainstay at the Philippine Cup finals? Chot Reyes. He led Coke to the finals in 2003, but quit midway through the 2004 tournament to focus on the national team. He returned to coaching with San Miguel in 2007, and made it to the finals again. Then he had another stint with the national team, and returned to Talk N Text in 2008, leading them to 2009’s Philippine Cup championship.