A gentle plea from a fiery coach playing ‘for fifth’: Give fans best PBA

NLEX head coach Yeng Guiao. PBA IMAGES

On the eve of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA) Rookie Draft, where every team earns a shot at gaining a key talent to improve their team’s chances in the coming season, NLEX coach Yeng Guiao is realistic enough to understand that there’s a ceiling to that hoped-for improvement.

And if you’re like the Road Warriors, that ceiling, it seems, is fifth place.

“Ginebra, San Miguel, [TNT], and Magnolia. Those are the top four teams and I think it would be difficult to take them down,” Guiao said in Filipino during an episode of The Chasedown on Saturday. “Everyone else is just battling for fifth place.”

“Of course, Phoenix, Meralco and Alaska improved. I hope we get to do so, too. But it will be extremely hard to take on those [four other] teams,” he added.Guiao has spent countless hours poring over the current rosters of those squads and each time he does, it’s becoming more apparent that beating those teams may end up being an exercise in futility.

Firepower

“Take a look at Ginebra, for example. Half of [the players in] that team are from the Gilas team I once coached,” he said. “That team now has Christian (Standhardinger). Stanley (Pringle) is in there, Japeth (Aguilar) is in there, LA (Tenorio) is in there, Scottie (Thompson) is there.”“Imagine the kind of firepower,” Guiao went on. “You cannot ‘out-talent’ that team. And you cannot outcoach coach Tim (Cone). So how are you going to beat that team?”

And then there are the Beermen.

Even with Most Valuable Player June Mar Fajardo out, the former Philippine Cup champions still have six other players who all played for Gilas, including the recently-acquired CJ Perez, who Guiao coached during the World Cup in China nearly two years ago.

Concentrated talent

There’s also Magnolia, who added many-time Gilas forward Calvin Abueva to a lineup that already has Mark Barroca, Jio Jalalon, Paul Lee and Ian Sangalang—all of whom donned the national threads in the past.Then there’s NLEX’s sister team TNT, whose core continues to feature Jayson Castro, Roger Pogoy, Troy Rosario and Poy Erram.

Guiao believes talent has become so concentrated among the perennial contenders, who also have at their disposal the finest of coaches in the league.

Fans will still watch

“All the top players are in the top four teams. And these top teams have the top coaches,” he said. “So what are you going to do? You can’t just outcoach those teams. You can’t ‘out-talent’ them, either, right? You’re going to say ‘just outwork them.’ [But] there is no team that is not working hard.”

What was supposed to be an assessment of teams quickly turned into a commentary on the league’s parity. Guiao feels such a glaring imbalance in talent may not cost the PBA fans, but that doesn’t take away its responsibility to give its spectators the finest competition it could roll out.

“You know, these PBA fans would still watch the games. The Filipinos simply love the game of basketball. So it’s really up to us all [in the PBA] to give them the best product,” he said.

“And just because fans are powerless [against concentration of talent in top teams], we shouldn’t just let them settle for that.”