THE hero of San Miguel’s historic ‘Beer-acle’ isn’t about to give up on the Beermen now.
With the Beermen staring at a 0-2 deficit against the top-seeded Bay Area Dragons in their PBA Commissioner’s Cup semifinals series, Chris Ross still sees a lot of fight left in the embattled defending champions.
For that to happen though, the Beermen need to focus on the things that allowed them to string up six straight wins bridging the homestretch of the eliminations all the way to the quarterfinals, Ross said.
[READ: Bay Area on the cusp of historic trip to PBA Finals]
“We just got to get back to playing the ball we’ve been playing,” said the veteran guard who was the Finals MVP when San Miguel did the impossible six years ago by becoming the first team to come back from a 0-3 deficit in the finals and win the Philippine Cup championship at the expense of Alaska.
“We’ve been putting our energy in the wrong places, and we need to focus on the things that we need to do.”
Behind import Andrew Nicholson (34 points, 16 rebounds) and Kobey Lam (25 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists), the Dragons dealt the defending champions a 114-95 beating in Friday’s Game 2 at the Philsports Arena to move on the brink of making the finals of the mid-season conference.
The 19-point blowout came on the heels of a 103-102 thriller in the series opener where the guest team from Hong Kong battled its way back from a 16-point deficit.
Ross said the Game 1 loss wasn’t a deflating one for the Beermen.
“Not at all,” said the Fil-Am guard. “More than anything else, it shows that we can beat them. We pretty much dominated them the whole game for 44 minutes, although we ended up losing.
“But that should give us the confidence that we can really beat them.”
For that to happen, San Miguel needs to get its act together again, according to Ross.
“This [Bay Area] is really a good team. We’re really a good team also, but we’re not focused on the things that needs to be done,” Ross said.
Game 3 is set on Sunday also in the Pasig venue.
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