What’s important is how they bounce back from that.
“We had a good practice, the team is healthy and we’re ready,” Victolero told the Inquirer Tuesday after preparing his Hotshots for Game 4 of their PBA Governors’ Cup title series against Alaska as they try to stay ahead of the best-of-seven series.
“Things like that happen to any team,” Victolero said of the 100-71 loss on Sunday that cut their lead to 2-1. “It also happened to us in the [Barangay] Ginebra [semifinal] series. We won the first two games and lost the third.
“But my players are veteran enough to rebound from that,” he declared. “It’s going to be another grind-out game.”
The fourth game is slated Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Smart Araneta Coliseum, and this could be crucial for both teams since a Magnolia win gives the Hotshots the inside track on their first title since 2014, while a loss would again make this series a toss-up.
Alaska will be taking some sort of momentum into the game, especially import Mike Harris, who snapped out of an offensive stupor in the first two games to shoot 36 points and grab 18 rebounds in just three quarters of Game 3.
How Harris got away with murder in that game is surely one thing that Victolero and his staff had figured out after getting two days off.
That time also served both teams well, with Victolero saying that his players are 100 percent and that the ankle twist that import Romeo Travis suffered in the third quarter of Game 3 turned out to be nothing.
“We treat each game as do-or-die, no matter what [the standings] say,” Alaska coach Alex Compton said in a separate interview when asked if Game 4 is a must-win game for his Aces. “We just want to play hard and play with everything we have in each possession.”
Alaska is seeking to end a five-year title drought, with Compton eyeing his first title in five tries, and he knows that it won’t be easy, especially after they practically gave away the series opener and “played sloppy [in the stretch] of Game 2.”
“It would have been nice if we were the ones 2-1 up,” he said. “But all we want right now is to turn this thing into a best-of-three [with a win in Game 4].”
Compton also believes that nothing like what happened to Magnolia in Game 3 will happen again for the rest of the series, but he just wishes that they’d be able to shoot the ball the way they did Sunday night.
“We made a lot of shots,” Compton said.