Wet market experts pick the Spurs

WASN’T Miami main man LeBron James like the fantastic, all-conquering Popeye who could not get hold of his can of spinach in the critical minutes of the NBA Finals Game One in San Antonio?

No, but he could not be Michael Jordan either.

Why?

Because James definitely did not know how to pace himself, he crashed out of the game after running out of body fluids and cramping.

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Don’t look now, but this exchange did not come from the TV desk of grizzled American sports analysts working the 2014 NBA championship series live.

In fact, you can’t likely find this brand of comment from any table or corner manned by so-called basketball scholars and experts.

They’re not spoken in a whisper, not at all loud, but always with a native passion coupled with quaint knowledge.

These free-wheeling views regularly emanate from our city’s cluttered wet market in Mandaluyong, where practically every other male daytime inhabitant is a self-styled basketball genius.

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James in the NBA Finals Game One was a predictable single-gear engine that always roars full blast.

If James, says pretty boy Buboy Sebreros, could learn to shift, go slow and fast, conserve for the crucial clashes, Miami could come back and equalize, if not in San Antonio then in Florida where they fly back for Game 3.

But hasn’t LeBron matured enough, as shown in his performance in the conference finals against Indiana?

Maybe, but there are characteristics and qualities in a superstar’s body that take time and a lot of trying to modify.

Or does James feel it’s still too early in his career to do a Jordan, slow down and temper his monster talent?

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Louie Sanyano, shortish sports addict with two front teeth missing, swears it was unfair to predict the 2014 NBA Finals would boil down to a Gregg Popovich-James series.

“You’re anti-Filipino, mahilig sa Americano,” cries the veteran meat cleaver.

He swears it’s the duty of all flag-loving Filipino basketball fans to support Fil-Am Miami mentor Eric Spoelstra, coveniently forgetting that, to a man, the Spurs is actually a gang of sharp hardcourt warriors that come from various capitals in Europe.

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Here, Dong “Tangkad,” a lanky coconut trader who played with the Jose Rizal University Bombers in the NCAA, swears coach Popovich benched his mainstays, led by center Tim Duncan in the third and fourth matches against Oklahoma for the Western conference crown, as part of advance strategy.

“Didn’t you see, nakita mo ba, how Tiago Splitter ably pinch-hit and play Duncan’s role in Game One?” he says.

No need for a body count, a gut feel would bare that, despite the danger of being labeled anti-Filipino, majority of these marketplace experts pick the Spurs to bag this year’s NBA crown.

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No, not because of Duncan and his mainstay teammates Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, but mainly due to coach Popovich and the intangibles he injects and blends in orchestrating a unified and very organized outfit.

By the way, what has been reported here is regularly replicated in countless nooks all over the Philippines, where basketball is followed and practiced like a religion.

Yes, it’s often to each his own, but these are basketball devotees who blindly rely on mini-miracles, not only in their basketball world, but in their private hardcourts where clawing and fighting hard (for a living) is the only rule.