Philippine basketball sports has started to develop a small but vibrant community on Twitter, and Fire Quinito rounds up the best messages from athletes, broadcasters, and fans, in 140 characters or less.




Here’s hoping that when we vote for Chris Tiu as our president in 25 years – you know, after he serves as Manny Pacquiao’s vice president for 6 years – he’ll still have a full head of hair.




I miss Ed Picson doing the coverage. Always loved him, especially kapag binabara niya si Quinito.




Nice. I wonder though if there’s a workout to make Dyan a better boxing announcer.




Yeah, go for it Boyet! Just remember: Flirting on Twitter is ok, but writing love letters leads to disbarment.




Cool. And it’s high praise too, because Howie and I have spoken before about David Halberstam’s classic “The Breaks of the Game.” Also, if you missed it, he left a comment on the post about his James Yap documentary, and called The Genius “cutie coach Ryan.”




And the fans concur. Ayos si Coach ah, parang (500) Days of Summer lang eh noh.




An underrated, amusing part of Howie’s documentary: FEU center Aldrech Ramos chilling out wearing a jejecap.




Had a nice, quick chat with Mico after last night’s game. He’s one of my favorite sportscasters. Plus, he gives hope to all of us short guys who want to be involved in basketball. Also, he’s married to Pia Arcangel, so that gives us even more hope. I should probably stop writing now before I get into trouble.

Anyway, I had a good time at the game even though Derby Ace lost. Speaking of which...




Yeah, this was after Marc Pingris had a monster, two-handed putback slam dunk to cut the San Miguel lead to 4. The Beermen called timeout, and the arena DJ played Baby. Pati pagkatalo ng Purefoods, kasalanan pa rin ni Bieber. While we’re on the subject of music…




If there ever was a Sweetest Tweets hall of fame, Robbie Reyes would be a first-ballot inductee.

I mentioned earlier that I had been planning to write about the Smart Gilas victory in the recently-concluded pocket tournament over Jordan. However, like everything else, including her brother’s inauguration, it had to take a backseat to an issue concerning Kris Aquino. I apologize for that.

Anyway, here are the things we learned from the invitational, apart from the fact that Mac Cardona punches like a chick:

• Mac Baracael was the hero of the final game against Jordan, and at this point, I think we could safely say that he’s they key to Smart Gilas’ upsets. This was also the case during the team’s successful campaign last January in Dubai, when Baracael caught fire and led the team to several upsets. When he’s shooting well, he opens up the Gilas offense, which is predicated on spacing and ball movement, making the team very hard to defend.
  
  That said, I can imagine why Toroman is still looking forward to having Kelly Williams on the team; in the first Jordan game, the visitors repeatedly took advantage of Baracael in the post and off the boards, and Toroman was forced to take him out and go with an awkward twin tower combination of Marcus Douthit and Greg Slaughter. It’s feast or famine with Baracael, and we’ve been fortunate that so far, it’s been more feast.


• Marcio Lassiter is pretty good, reminds me of Jeffrey Cariaso.


• Dongguan coach Brian Goorijan gave high marks for the Gilas offense, but I think two things that really make the Gilas so effective on the offensive end doesn’t necessarily have to do with putting the ball in the basket: they never turn the ball over, and they always have floor balance. International teams like Jordan and Iran make a lot of hay off the break, but the Gilas offense is geared to prevent just that. This is also the reason the Powerade team looked so bad against these international teams in the Jones Cup; poorly-prepared teams tend to turn over the ball a lot, which leads to a lot of easy baskets on the other end.
  
  That’s almost never the case for Smart Gilas, or at least, its man-to-man offense. Their zone offense, however, could use a little more fine-tuning.


• Elsewhere on the Internet, people have been bagging on Gilas about their defense. I tend to disagree; I think they have a great defensive system in place, one that even Talk N Text has adopted too. They do a great job of cutting the court in half, preventing all-important swing passes from the strong side to the weak side, and clogging the middle effectively.
  
  They could still do a better job of cleaning up the defensive glass, and it would help if they forced a few more turnovers. But I’m not sure they can do that with the personnel they have on the team currently. They just don’t have the size or the length to do both at a high level.


• Sure, they only played against a Dongguan team that was still trying to find its way, but the Talk N Text Tropang Texters looked like the best team in the tourney; their offense was very crisp, and they were much more active and effective on defense.
  
  It makes me wonder: Are we underrating our PBA teams? Even Ginebra, which has been mediocre in the ongoing PBA Fiesta Conference, was able to stay toe-to-toe with Jordan, despite the fact that they looked like they were treating the game like a half-assed scrimmage. I’m not talking about star-studded PBA-organized national teams, but PBA teams per se. Are they better than we give them credit for?
  
  It also makes me curious about just how effective some guys who probably wouldn’t have a chance to get picked for Asian-level competitions would do. Will LA Tenorio be able to get in the lane and loft floaters against Asian teams? Will Marc Pingris’ madman act work against bigger and heftier opponents? Can Sol Mercado barrel his way to the ring? Will opposing point guards in Asia panic when Paul Artadi harasses them in the backcourt?
  
  The kneejerk answer is no… but unless we see it on the court, we’ll never know, wouldn’t we?


• Then again, JC Intal probably wouldn’t be able to get to the lane so easily if Jordan’s injured big men made the Manila trip. Rasheim Wright is reportedly also still recovering from a knee injury. The Gilas victory over Jordan is impressive, but I hope no one’s getting over-confident over the result.


• Also, the refereeing was clearly slanted in favor of the local teams; the foreign teams probably didn’t mind so much, because these things are par for the course for these types of tournaments. But for a country that always rails against bad officiating, man, we sure can eat up loads upon loads of lutong macao if it benefits our team.

To the naked eye, the last two games of the ongoing PBA Philippine Cup finals series between Purefoods and Alaska have been pretty much alike. They have been low-scoring games, with Purefoods pulling out the win at the last possessions.

The scores have been low because these teams play slow; as j_myxx of Patay ang Butiki pointed out in the comments of my post about game 1, these are the two slowest teams in the league. However, adjusting the scores for pace shows that the two games were vastly different: game 2 was a wild shootout, with each team going over the 100-point efficiency mark, while game three was a defensive struggle, as Purefoods barely topping 90 points while holding Alaska to 89.

	PF PTS	ALA PTS	PF EFF EFF	ALA EFF	POSS
Game 2	86	85	102.41	101.22	83
Game 3	79	78	90.78	89.63	87

The data is even more interesting when looking at Purefoods’ last six games (all wins), dating back to its semifinals series against San Miguel. Two things stand out: Purefoods is playing at its preferred slow pace, and there’s no rhyme or reason for their wins.



They’ve been winning in hoop-burning shootouts, and they’ve been winning in ugly defensive battles. To put it more succinctly, Ryan Gregorio’s boys have been finding ways to win ballgames.

Last night was no different. With James Yap and Kerby Raymundo (well, especially Kerby Raymundo) shooting miserably from the field, bench players Peter June Simon (in the first half) and KG Canaleta (in the second half) stepped up and hit big shots. Credit really must go to Purefoods coach Ryan Gregorio for sticking with those two guys and giving them the green light to shoot, even if it means allowing Canaleta to hoist up turnaround, fadeaway three-pointers. Also, Gregorio played Simon at point guard for a stretch in the first half, allowing the struggling super-sub to have the ball in his hands to run the pick-and-roll and shoot over LA Tenorio. Rookie Rico Maierhofer had a good stretch too, slithering his way to easy baskets around the hoop.

It helps Purefoods’ cause that they have Marc Pingris and Rafi Reavis wreaking havoc on the boards. It just brings such a different dynamic to the game for a shooter to know that he can throw it up, because he has those guys hanging around the paint waiting to clean up his mess.

Alaska started out fairly strongly, matching up with Purefoods with their own big-ball lineup, as Tim Cone inserted Reynel Hugnatan to start the game in lieu of Tony de la Cruz. The move forces Purefoods to guard Hugnatan with their small forward (usually Marc Pingris), which means Sakuragi couldn’t go out and harass either of Alaska’s guards out in the perimeter. Unlike with dela Cruz, Purefoods can’t get away with guarding Hugnatan with James Yap.

But big ball only works when you can actually go with a big lineup, and Alaska couldn’t go big when Sonny Thoss got into foul trouble. I’ve mentioned before in my post about Alaska and in my FHM preview that Thoss might be the Aces’ most important player, and it was on full display last night, as Purefoods feasted on them when he was on the bench. This is why the Samigue Eman pickup could potentially be so great for Alaska, because if the big guy can develop, the Aces wouldn’t have to take such a big hit when Thoss is chilling on the bench.

One more thing I’d like to note about the game last night was LA Tenorio starting to pull all his crap again. The flopping, the flailing, the posturing, the ‘incidental’ forearms he leaves on his defender before getting the ball on the inbounds, and just his general smarmy douchiness. He was in tip-top OA Tenorio form all game long, and I think that he squandered all of Alaska’s karma after game 2. The basketball gods do not suffer douchebags gladly.

Alaska now faces very tall odds in this series. Will they win? Probably not. Can they win? Since we started with some stats stuff, let me throw out this old post from ESPN’s John Hollinger writing about 0-3 comebacks in the NBA:

All 83 times that a team has taken a 3-0 lead in an NBA best-of-seven playoff series, it has gone on to win the series.

But somebody is going to be the first to buck the trend. It happened for the first time in baseball with the Red Sox a few years ago, and inevitably it will happen in basketball, too.

And when would it happen? Most likely with a team that's basically as good as its opponent.

The logic applies too in the PBA. If a comeback from a 0-3 deficit were to happen – and at this point, the chances are very, very slim – it would happen when two teams are evenly matched. Patay ang Butiki noted that, before the series, each team had practically the same point-differential over its opponents. Statistically, the teams were about the same. You can’t get more evenly-matched than that.

At the start of most PBA games, some announcer (usually Quinito Henson) would throw out some meaningless statistic like “If Purefoods holds Alaska down to less than 85 points, they’ll probably win the ballgame.” I keep waiting for them to say something like “If Purefoods holds Alaska to fewer points, they’ll probably win.” Yeah, and if they do it four times, they’ll win the series.

So I decided to crunch some numbers and apply some advanced statistics to Game 1 of the PBA Philippine Cup finals last night. I got the data from the last three games of each team, and computed for their offensive and defensive ratings, which are adjusted for the number of possessions in each game. Here’s what I found:

Alaska’s offense sputtered. In its last three games against Ginebra, Alaska scored 101.81 points per 100 possessions. Purefoods brought that number down to only 90.40 last night.



Purefoods’ defense is coming together. In games 4 and 5 of the San Miguel series, Purefoods burned the hoops by averaging 113 points per 100 possessions. However, they clinched the series with defense, holding San Miguel’s offensive rating to only 86.74 in game 6 of that series. They weren’t as great last night, but it was still pretty good.



They’re playing at Purefoods’ pace. In a way, the ‘hold them down to X points’ statistic is true, but not for the reason you think. In Purefoods’ case, it’s not so much a factor of the team defending well as much as it controlling the tempo. In each of Alaska’s last three wins over Ginebra, the game had at least 90 possessions, something that never happened during Purefoods’ games against San Miguel. Last night, the possession count was at 85, which is firmly in Purefoods’ comfort zone.



Alaska’s last four games

	TM PTS	OPP PTS	OFF EFF	DEF EFF	POSS
vs. Ginebra, Game 2	90	82	96.26	87.70	93
vs. Ginebra, Game 3	91	88	96.27	93.09	94
vs. Ginebra, Game 4	102	95	112.90	105.15	90
vs. Purefoods, Game 1	77	81	90.40	95.09	85

Purefoods’ last four games

	TM PTS	OPP PTS	OFF EFF	DEF EFF	POSS
vs. San Miguel, Game 4	97	84	113.32	98.13	85
vs. San Miguel, Game 5	94	82	113.93	99.39	82
vs. San Miguel, Game 6	87	78	96.75	86.74	89
vs. Alaska, Game 1	81	77	95.09	90.40	85

So how did Purefoods limit Alaska last night? Marc Pingris started the game on LA Tenorio, denying penetration and daring the spitfire point guard to shoot over him. Sakuragi also affected Tenorio’s passing with his long arms, blocking clean angles to passing lanes; notice how far outside the block Sonny Thoss had to go get the ball. It didn’t help that Tenorio drew the assignment to take James Yap (a matchup I talked about in a previous post), and the 2006 MVP was on fire, scoring 24 points on 14 shots.

In the second half, Pingris switched to Willie Thriller, but by then Tenorio was sufficiently cowed that he was no longer a factor. In fact, his backup, Brandon Cablay, had a better game in limited minutes.

Purefoods had great defensive energy all game, keeping their men in front of them in man-to-man sets while playing a very aggressive zone defense that extended out and stifled Alaska’s shooters. It remains to be seen, however, if they will be able to keep up this kind of defensive energy.

Curiously, this is the same defensive energy that carried Purefoods to the 2006 Philippine Cup title over Red Bull, with Pingris leading the way en route to being named finals MVP of that series. But I expect Tim Cone to come up with adjustments not just for his team to be able to score, but perhaps more importantly, to pick up the pace.