Blackwater just took down one of the teams to beat in the PBA Philippine Cup on Friday night, and coach Leo Isaac will go into the locker room for the post-game talk with his Elite to ask them to forget about the whole thing after a couple of hours.
“We (coaching staff) would need to condition their minds to not rest on what they have accomplished,” Isaac said, referring to an impressive 94-77 ripping of Barangay Ginebra which could go for naught if the Elite don’t follow it up the right way in five days’ time.
“I will tell them that we would have to start from scratch,” he said after the win, carved out in front of a disappointed pro-Ginebra crowd at Mall of Asia Arena in Pasay where Blackwater got a combined 61 points from JP Erram, Mac Belo and Allein Maliksi.
“I hope we can sustain this win,” Isaac said as he bared that the key to the victory was actually the upset the Elite posted against Rain or Shine last week, which gave the team “the confidence that they can beat anyone.”
Blackwater led for majority of the contest and showed immense poise in the stretch when the Gin Kings tried coming up with their trademark rally.
Erram finished with 22 points like Belo, and together with Maliksi, they scored 20 of the 30 Blackwater points in the fourth, most of them coming when the game hung in the balance.
“It’s something special handing Ginebra its first loss,” Isaac said.
Greg Slaughter scored 20 points but laid a big fat egg in the fourth, with LA Tenorio shooting 16 and Japeth Aguilar 14 for the Kings, who slipped out of the lead and fell into a tie with their conquerors.
Stanley Pringle fired 29 points and helped GlobalPort lead practically the entire night as the Batang Pier bounced back from a horrendous fold up the last time up to rise to 1-2 with a 78-70 victory over Rain or Shine in the first game.
“We finished stronger this time,” a smiling GlobalPort coach Pido Jarencio said. “Unlike in the last game where we played well for 45 minutes. ”