Ateneo bench celebrates sweep of elimination round. Photo by Tristan Tamayo/INQUIRER.net
MANILA, Philippines—Ateneo completed just the second elimination round sweep of the Final Four era but there’s no resting for the defending champion.
Head coach Tab Baldwin said that the Blue Eagles will immediately go to work starting on Thursday as they try to keep in championsip shape while awaiting their opponent in the Finals.
“At this point, I can say that I’m very proud of these men and I know that they will not take that as any sort of sign to relax. In fact, we practice tomorrow,” said Baldwin after the Blue Eagles achieved the 14-0 sweep with an 86-64 shellacking of University of the Philippines Wednesday at Mall of Asia Arena.
Ateneo replicated the elimination round success of University of the East in 2007, then led by Paul Lee and Mark Borboran, when it also went 14-0 in the preliminaries.
Baldwin, however, isn’t contented with the sweep and nothing would put them at ease apart from the championship.
“Our job is far from over. I believe we have an outstanding basketball team, but we haven’t proven ourselves at the last hurdle yet,” said Baldwin. “We don’t have a break, basically it’s all business as usual.”
Baldwin said that to keep his team from performing at its best and having a squad primed for the title, he plans to add more schemes to their system once they know who they will be facing for the championship.
“We will just prepare for our opponent specifically once we know who that is but in the meantime we will work to build our basketball team,” said Baldwin. “We will put some new stuff in that teams won’t be able to go back and review.”
“These other teams are going to slug it out and there is an argument that those games would keep them sharp and fresh, but we’ll be sharp. I don’t have any doubt that we will fall off our game.”