June Mar Fajardo vs Rain or Shine defenders. Photo by Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net
San Miguel Beer, with its outside game helping out the unstoppable June Mar Fajardo inside the paint, tries to finish off Rain or Shine today and march on to the title playoffs of the Smart Bro-PBA Philippine Cup at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
The first of two chances the Beermen have in shooing away the Elasto Painters for good happens at 7 p.m., with San Miguel riding the momentum of two impressive victories where Fajardo was not as overworked as he was in the previous three games.
This will be the second KO match for the Painters this conference, and they must play a lot better and dig even deeper if they want to even entertain thoughts of taking this Final Four series into a Game 7, which they said was their ultimate goal.
The Painters also went up in a you-or-me clash with TNT in the quarterfinals and came out of it impressively.
But that form—or even the form they showed in the first three games of this series—is far from what the Painters have been displaying of late, especially on the defensive end.
“We need to play better defense overall,” Rain or Shine coach Yeng Guiao said. “We’ve allowed them to shoot (more than) 50 percent from the field in the last two games, and that’s just too much.
“Our offense can be off and we can still win,” he added. “But we cannot win without our defense.”
Should San Miguel wrap this series up today, Game 1 of the best-of-seven Finals will be played on Sunday, also at the Big Dome in Cubao, where the Beermen will again clash with Alaska for the most prestigious crown of the season.
San Miguel beat the Aces in a classic Game 7 last season. Alaska has been waiting for a title series foe since Tuesday after making short work of Final Four newcomer GlobalPort, 4-1.
“We haven’t achieved anything yet,” San Miguel coach Leo Austria said after a 103-94 Game 5 win on Wednesday. “We still have to win one more game.”
San Miguel will be coming off its lowest output in the series with Fajardo’s 27 points and 12 rebounds representing his lows in the Final Four.