MERALCO consultant Nenad Vucinic pinpointed their Game 3 loss in the PBA Commissioner’s Cup semifinals as the beginning of the end after falling in six games to TNT in their playoffs clash.
Speaking to reporters after Meralco’s 97-94 loss on Sunday at the Ynares Center, Vucinic said their failure to take advantage of an import-less Tropang 5G side was the gut punch which sent them reeling, a hit so big that even a late import change can’t fix.
Meralco ultimately replaced Marvin Jones with Patrick Garnder, won Game 4, but lost the next two including in Game 6 where TNT played without Chris McCullough in the final four minutes.
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“I thought that after Game 3 when they played without an import and we struggled to win the game, to overpower them, our chemistry was really low, so we made a change. One that started in Game 4 which I think if we didn’t [change imports] we wouldn’t have won that,” Vucinic said.
The Serbian consultant nonetheless tipped his hat to a TNT side that showed its versatility all-series long, hurting Meralco from many different ways.
“This semifinals, Talk and Text is great. They have very intelligent players and coaching staff. They always find new ways to attack, sometimes [they attack with] size, sometimes with their speed,” he stated.
“Even in this game, I thought we fought back well. Again they played very well, they attacked us very well. We had heart to come back and had a chance to win, a couple of calls could’ve gone our way in the end but Talk N Text definitely deserves to go through to the finals.”
Despite coming up short, Vucinic was positive about how the conference went for the team as they’ve remained relatively atop the standings from start to finish, recovered from a mid-conference slide, beat a red-hot Magnolia team in the quarterfinals and made it to six games against a very tough Tropang 5G side.
“I thought it was a solid conference. We played reasonably consistently. We had drops throughout the conference, lost some games but made the Top Four and got twice to beat,” he said.
"That’s a big thing in the quarterfinals. Played a very very tough team in an in-form Magnolia, it was a very difficult quarterfinals for us but we managed to get through.”
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