Unbelievable that Ginebra could only score 26 points in the entire 24-minute second half in Sunday’s Game 3 at the MOA Arena in Pasay City.
Result? The defending champion dropped an 83-74 loss to Meralco, giving the Bolts a 2-1 edge in their fight-for-four title showdown for the PBA Governors’ Cup before a predominantly pro-Ginebra crowd of 16,000.
They play Game 4 on April 13 at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, with Meralco hell-bent on duplicating its suffocating defense that forced a diet of puny points on Ginebra.
Those 26 points could be the worst all-time second-half output for Ginebra, uglified all the more by Justin Brownlee’s anemic 19-point total.
LeBron James can easily amass 26 points in a single quarter on a given day. Steph Curry, too. And also Michael Jordan in his heyday.
Brownlee’s 19 points was appalling, to say the least.
It came after the leading candidate for the best import award scored his career playoff of 47 points just four games back.
Has Meralco coach Norman Black found the key to minimize Brownlee’s propensity to produce buckets in abundance?
“I sound like a broken record sometimes, but both teams played really good defense tonight,” Black said. “You can tell that by the score. It was very difficult to score, so it’s just a matter of just getting some stops.”
The bulk of those stops definitely came from Cliff Hodge, who starved Brownlee to a 1-of-10 clip from three-point country.
Hodge, the most foul-prone player in PBA history, got big lifts from a double-teaming defense on Brownlee as Brownlee’s lone triple contributed to Ginebra’s horrific 4-of-32 showing from beyond the arc. That was a far cry from the Gin Kings’ 13 threes in their 99-93 Game 2 win.
And while Brownlee struggled, not Meralco import Tony Bishop Jr. Bishop fired 30 points and grabbed 16 rebounds, his efforts amply backed up by Chris Newsome’s 20 points, 11 boards and 6 assists.
And then Allein Maliksi scored 7 of his 10 points in the crucial fourth quarter to more than atone for his zero showing in Game 2 after firing 22 points in Meralco’s Game 1 triumph.
Can Ginebra forge a 2-2 tie on Wednesday?
“I live in the present,” Black said. “We’re up 2-1. We have a couple days to get our legs fresh.”
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Scottie Scheffler, 25, the Masters winner yesterday, became golf’s world No. 1 in 42 days. Tiger Woods did it in 252 days.