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TNT import Glen Rice Jr. isn’t too concerned with the way his team got whipped by Ginebra in Game 1 of the 2017 PBA Governors’ Cup semifinals.
Instead, Rice is already looking forward to Game 2 with the KaTropa eyeing to level the series.
“It don’t matter how much we lost. That’s the great thing about the playoffs. We could have lost by a buzzer-beater or we could have lost by 30, but it’s still a best-of-five series,” he said, shrugging off the KaTropa’s humbling 121-94 Game 1 defeat to the Gin Kings on Monday.
Rice fought valiantly for his side, collecting 26 points, 10 rebounds, four assists, and three steals, but failed to get much support from his teammates except for Jayson Castro and Roger Pogoy.
Also making it hard for the KaTropa was their 22 turnovers.
Rice doesn’t seem to be alarmed despite TNT suffering a 27-point beatdown, but he’d like to see his team play with more energy starting Game 2.
“I just feel sometimes that we bring little bit of energy and sometimes we don’t. Even in the first game versus Rain or Shine, our energy wasn’t the best. So I think it’s something that we need to continue to work on — consistency,” he said.
“We can’t have one game when we blow somebody out and in the next game we get blown out. It doesn’t work like that. We got to be consistent and if we lose, we lose, but we gonna lose playing the way that we play, which is playing hard.”
Rice said the loss was still a hard pill to swallow for any team. But he added there’s no time to sulk as with only little time to prepare for Wednesday’s Game 2 in Batangas.
“It’s gonna be hard when you lose like that,” he said. “There’s probably so many things that I would be looking at the film see what went wrong. But they were the better team tonight and I got to tip my hat to them. I guess they strategized better, they played better, they knocked down more shots, they defended better.
“But that’s the good thing about the playoffs. You got to win best-of-5. It’s not one game and lost so we just got to get back, watch the film, we’ll talk about it as a team tomorrow. We got to figure out a way where we can strive to do and play better on Wednesday.”