The buzz is that after winning the Philippine Cup championship, Purefoods will be changing its name to promote the company’s B-Meg line of animal feeds. An NBN Sports report said that the new name will be the ‘Derby Ace Llamados’ after B-Meg’s gamefowl feeds brand. I don’t mind the Derby Ace name, but do they really have to pander so shamefully to the lo-diyes crowd with the Llamados nickname? Why not the Derby Ace Slashers, which is way cooler?

Then again, the team is already currently nicknamed the ‘Tender Juicy Giants’ which has to be one of the most awful (and frankly, kinda gay) nicknames in the history of basketball, so rooting for the Llamados wouldn’t be so bad, right? Also it could’ve been worse, as the team could’ve been named after hog pellets or tilapia feeds. Or chick boosters.

Still, part of me thinks that this is San Miguel Corporation management’s punishment for Purefoods for kicking San Miguel’s ass in the semifinals.

Anyway, a lot of interesting stuff around the Internet after Purefoods’ masterful victory over the Alaska Aces last night.

• You should all start checking out IV Point Play, an impressive new Pinoy sports blog by Polo Bustamante and Carlo Araneta. The guys also produce a pretty entertaining podcast called ‘From the Stands’ (episode 4 was particularly good). Both guys behind the blog are Alaska fans, so I enjoyed their analysis of how Purefoods won: “So the Purefoods TJ Giants are kings of the Philippine Basketball world, and they totally deserve it, while Alaska, for the second straight year, is left searching for what prevents them from taking the next step forward. Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.”


• Jude Turcuato attended the game live last night, and raved about the King of the PBA, James Yap: “A smooth operator, he doesn't get too excited or too down. He is like a well oiled machine built to play on the court and get the job done. He is the best offensive player in the PBA right now and it seems his defense is catching up as well. You can tell that although he doesn’t talk much, his teammates rely on him to lead them and James embraces the responsibility. James is a player who has the fans holding their breath in anticipation whenever he has the ball. Very few have that ability.”
  
  There’s also this interesting note on Jude’s discussion with Coach Ryan before the team drafted Yap in 2004: “When Coach Ryan told me that James is the best player in the draft, I thought he was in one of his hyperbolic raves again. I worked with him in the UAAP panel and a little in the PBA and he did have a tendency to get over excited about basketball, which I think is great.”


• The last several games of Purefoods are available on Bit Torrent at IP Mart. You can download using the using these credentials – username: tjgiants2010/password: tjgiants. As always, with these things, kindly seed.


• Finally, Ginebra fans taking on Alaska with a little help from the April Boys:

I mentioned before that I laugh at the most inappropriate things, so when I saw the latest chapter of Nonito Donaire Jr.’s feud with his father on Jude Turcuato’s blog, I cracked up. It’s a serious matter, and I shouldn’t really be laughing but I can’t help it. Jude’s somber take on it is appropriate, and perhaps you should read that first.

Now, I’m assuming you’re still here and you want to find out what’s so funny. First, I guess we need background on everything that’s happened between Nonito Jr. and Nonito Sr. A couple of years ago, Donaire fired his father as trainer. The old man has been bitter about it ever since, blaming the influence of Donaire’s wife Rachel, for the estrangement.

The elder Donaire has been yapping at his son ever since. Last year, when asked to compare Nonito Jr. to his latest protégé, Marvin Sonsona, he said, “[Sonsona] is ready to fight [Donaire] now.” That tipped everyone off that, Hey, maybe this old guy is just bitter, and maybe a little off his rocker. Nonito Jr. is, after all, a top pound-for-pound boxer, while Sonsona was a raw teenager. Incidentally, Sonsona was knocked out badly in his title fight this weekend and is reportedly considering retirement, because he never liked boxing all that much.

Last week, before Sonsona’s fight, Nonito Sr. took time out from his busy training schedule to disparage his son once more, speaking to Dennis Guillermo of Examiner.com.





Nonito Jr. found all this a little too much, and decided to release a video statement of his own. The funny part comes… oh, just watch the damn thing!



I suppose this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since Nonito Jr. is pretty showbiz himself. It should be noted that Jericho Rosales also once played another great Filipino champion, Manny Pacquiao in a biopic. That’s one more thing the two of them have in common.

“Fire Quinito is a very, very impressive Philippine sports blog, and I'm not saying that only because the guy who runs it reads my stuff. The blog's take on Philippine sports is funny and right.”
-- Rafe Bartholomew, author of Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball

“Gutsy.”
-- Tim Cone, Alaska Aces coach

“Irreverent, objective, witty, straight to the point. Just as sports reportage should be. Yes, even when it attacks the 'numerous dick moves' of Chot Reyes.”
-- Chot Reyes, Talk N Text Tropang Texters Coach

“Fire Quinito reminds us that reading about sports should be as fun as watching or playing them.”
-- Howie Severino, GMANews.TV Editor-in-Chief

“In a culture of kiss asses, it seems [Fire Quinito] has been refreshing in the sports community.”
-- Jude Turcuato, longtime play-by-play announcer and former marketing head of Solar Sports

“I must say it is refreshing to see the reporting as blunt and candid as [Fire Quinito] is.”
-- Fred Uytengsu, Alaska Aces team owner and former PBA chairman

“At 1st why Fire Quinito? I find it really weird to get accolades at the expense of a sports institution. And where is the moral value for awarding you a blog award? You are just an ant compared to someone like Quinito who has been around the writing world as early as your diaper days. You are just a small insect and Quinito won't make patol to you ever and never...”
-- Boyet Dones on Twitter

• PBA Commissioner Sonny Barrios will fine Talk N Text more than PhP1-million for their walkout. Fidel Mangonon has all the numbers.


• Jude Turcuato, who had a short stint working in the PBA Commissioner’s Office a few years ago, writes in his blog from the perspective of both a fan, and someone who has seen how the Talk N Text organization operates: “Throughout the whole Asi Taulava ordeal about his citizenship, TNT Management always felt that (then-Commissioner) Noli (Eala) was unfair with disallowing their big man to play because of him not having the proper documentation. They even had the PNP ready to arrest the commissioner at one point with cops at the Araneta if he didn't allow Asi to play.”


• Ronnie Nathanielsz, not surprisingly, defended the Talk N Text decision. At this point, Nathanielsz is the closest thing that the Philippine sports scene has to a moral compass; if he’s taking one position, you could almost be certain that the opposite position is the correct one.


• Tito Talao opened his column about Manny Pangilinan with this line: “Like the noble captain of a doomed ship, Talk ’N Text team owner Manny V. Pangilinan waited until everyone aboard had been saved before quietly stepping off deck Sunday night.” Yuck. Will he be faxing this column to Pangilinan’s office along with the solicitation letter for the PBA Press Corps Christmas Party? (I’m kidding.)


• Sometimes Recah Trinidad annoys me.
  
  There is the way he writes one sentence paragraphs, to make all his points seem profound—not to mention to stretch his point across the Inquirer’s column inches.
  
  * * *
  
  But sometimes, it works.
  
  Take his column about game 5 of the Ginebra-Talk N Text quarterfinal series, for example.
  
  He paints a picture of Manny Pangilinan and Chot Reyes’ terrible realization of the game four mistake—the walkout that was unwarranted.
  
  * * *
  
  It left the reader wondering, if there was something up with Pangilinan leaving the Araneta Coliseum so late. There must have been nagging questions.
  
  Could one of those questions be about Reyes’ job?

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, after the jump.