WITH less than two full seasons as a head coach in the PBA and three runner-up finishes to show, Alaska’s Alex Compton knows exactly the one and only thing he has going against Rain or Shine counterpart Yeng Guiao.
“Lamang ko lang sa kanya buhok, eh (I have hair, that’s my only edge),” Compton told reporters with a smile on Wednesday after he and his Aces advanced to a best-of-seven title series against Guiao and his Elasto Painters starting today at Smart Araneta Coliseum.
Compton gets his second chance this season to win a maiden title, and he will try to do it with a depleted lineup against the man regarded as one of the best motivators in the land, whose style Compton is trying to mimic.
“A lot of what coach Yeng does is cut, copy, paste in the sense of what I do (at Alaska),” he said. “He has a system that we have, in a lot of ways, tried to copy ourselves.”
“I like to watch good coaches and steal from them, if you will.”
One of Compton’s three runner-up finishes is most painful—Alaska bungled a 3-0 lead in this season’s Philippine Cup title series only to lose to San Miguel Beer.
The Aces will come into this series as the slight underdogs, with JV Casio out of it because of a leg injury and Vic Manuel still listed as day-to-day. And they would play the series opener on just one-day’s rest.
Clearly, the Aces cannot afford to have another meltdown like the one they had against the Beermen for it could stress Compton out into losing his hair, too.