Beermen eye 3-1 Finals lead

Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net

San Miguel Beer will face the same enemy it conquered in the last two games of the PBA Commissioner’s Cup Finals, with TNT KaTropa deciding to stick it out with Joshua Smith.

With a 2-1 lead and authoritative winners of Games 2 and 3, the Beermen will come into this crucial 7 p.m. encounter at Smart Araneta Coliseum as the solid favorites to move closer to bagging the second jewel of a Grand Slam.

And TNT will try to get back into the fight with Smith aboard, after coach Nash Racela decided against tapping standby import Mike Myers because he already has identified the reasons for the last two losses.

“We have to limit our turnovers,” Racela said, knowing that falling into a 1-3 hole could just be too big of a mountain for his Texters to scale, especially against a powerhouse and cohesive team like San Miguel.

TNT had 23 errors in Game 3, with franchise player Jason Castro highlighting the Texters’ struggles with 10 turnovers.

Chris Ross and Alex Cabagnot, just two of the pieces that are making the San Miguel machine hum on all cylinders, will be disputing the Best Player of the Conference award in what is possibly the closest race this league has seen.

Cabagnot and Ross finished in a dead heat in the statistical points race after the Final Four—something that hasn’t happened before—with votes from the media and the league as well as fellow players to determine the winner.

No Best Player of the Conference race has been shared by two players before.

To inspire TNT to a Game 4 fightback it badly needs, team owner Manny V. Pangilinan stopped by in the practice on Tuesday, joining the team for lunch and giving them a pep talk at Moro Lorenzo Gym inside the Ateneo campus.