BARANGAY Ginebra coach Tim Cone said he and the team are moving on without Justin Brownlee, saying he expects the team to fight ffor a championship in the PBA Commissioner’s Cup with replacement Tony Bishop.
Cone is confident Bishop can bring Ginebra back to the top while filling in for Brownlee, who faces a lengthy absence after testing positive for a banned substance after Gilas Pilipinas won the gold medal at the Asian Games.
COLUMN: Weird feeling as Tony Bishop finds self on the other side
For Ginebra to be successful this conference to begin with, Cone noted the importance of not comparing Bishop with Brownlee, and that starts within the team.
“Justin can almost justify the label of greatest of all time import so it’s be unfair to measure anybody up to Justin. Everybody’s going to fall short. So I think that’s the thing that we are grasping as a team," he said.
"The guys at Ginebra, they are understanding that we are going to find the strengths and use the strengths of Tony as best we can and that’s what we have in front of us,” said Cone.
“We are not gonna lose a game and turn around and say ‘Oh, Justin would have made that shot.’ That’s not fair. That gives us a built-in excuse and we don’t want to use any excuses. So we expect to go out and compete for a championship. And we think Tony will be a huge part of that,” Cone said.
Cone used comparisons to Michael Jordan as an example.
“[Bishop is] not Justin. Nobody’s gonna be Justin. People make the comparisons and, in some way, I think there’s kind of a little bit fair in terms of perspective, but a lot of people compare Justin to Michael Jordan in terms of our league and the things he does and the things he used to accomplish with us.
"Just like in the NBA, you can’t compare anybody to Michael Jordan. Anytime you try to compare to Michael Jordan, it’s an unfair comparison because he is the greatest of all time,” Cone said.
Daunting task for Bishop, Gin Kings
Cone acknowledges that Ginebra faces a daunting task in the absence of Brownlee, but that doesn’t mean it’s not doable.
Cone said he personally chose Bishop because of the things he can potentially bring to Ginebra after they played against him when he was the import of Meralco back in the 2022 PBA Governors’ Cup Finals.
“I feel terrible for Justin and I feel terrible that we’re not being able to bring him back to this conference so he can defend his championship and I feel terrible for the players because they absolutely love Justin,” Cone said.
“But bottomline is at this point, we have to move forward from that and I was tasked from or looking for another import once we heard that this might happen. And one of the first guys we thought of was Tony Bishop, only because we knew Tony from our series that we had against them in the finals.
“When you play a championship series against another team, you really get to know about that team, you get to know about those players, you know their strengths, you know their weaknesses. You even get to see how they interact with their teammates and how well they adjusted to the coaches and everything.”
“Tony Bishop was positive to us and so he seemed a real logical choice for us to bring in because of his versatility and his ability to work with his teammates and be a good teammate. He’s very unselfish and he does a lot of dirty work and those are the imports that we kind of pride ourselves in,” said Cone.
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