Fool’s consolation?
After punching the final ticket to the PBA Governors’ Cup quarterfinals, Barangay Ginebra will have a tough matchup with the San Miguel Beermen.
The Gin Kings stamped the last ticket to the quarters via a 101-96 win over the Blackwater Bossing Friday evening.
This placed them at the third seed of Group B, which put them on a collision course with San Miguel in the best-of-five quarterfinals.
After their win over the Bossing, Ginebra head coach Tim Cone called it ‘consuelo de bobo’.
‘Consuelo de bobo. You fight your way to the playoffs and your reward is you have to face San Miguel. But, you don’t get to really choose who you get to play. I think once you get into the point where you start choosing, I don’t know, it’s just like bad karma or whatever,’ he said.
‘To me, I’ve always felt through the years that you play the game the way you’re supposed to play it. You play it hard. You play it to win. And then you let the cards fall where they may. And you take care of business, what’s in front of you,’ he added.
Cone stressed that he believes ‘there was not much choice’ in the quarterfinals, as they would face either the explosive San Miguel squad or the top seed of Group A, the NLEX Road Warriors.
‘NLEX has been playing great, great basketball conference long. They beat us up in a practice game. So it wasn’t really a team that we were excited to play either,’ he said.
‘And obviously, we’re not excited to play San Miguel… But, it’s a best of five series. So, you know, that kind of equals it all out. So it’ll be should be a really good battle to see who comes in. I think the matchups are kind of very interesting.’
Following an up-and-down conference, Ginebra had to win three of their last four elimination round games to make it to the quarterfinals.
Heading to the matchup with the Bossing, Ginebra, the 4-6 Meralco Bolts and Blackwater were still in the running for the final playoff berth.
‘Well, first let me say that it was, this was a tough group and we’re real proud of our guys for working their way back into the conference after, you know, working our way back into the group and still making the playoffs. And I guess we finished as the third seed,’ he said.
‘Didn’t look that way a couple weeks ago, so we had to really scratch and claw to get to where we were.’
Game 1 of the Gin Kings-Beermen clash will be on Tuesday, 7:30 p.m., at the Smart Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City.