TNT coach Chot Reyes had the luxury of advancing first to the semifinals of the mid-season tilt and waiting for his team’s opponent.
“With excellent imports, both tall imports, and we all know that these big imports have just given us problems in the past,” Reyes said. “So I haven’t even thought about it because our full focus was just to win the game against Eastern.
“But now we’re going to shift that to those two teams and they’re both very good, very strong teams. They love to run, they’re athletic, they’re well-constructed, well coached,” he added.
Now comes the hard part for Reyes and his Tropang Giga when they take on the upstart Rain or Shine Elasto Painters in the best-of-7 semis showdown in the PBA Commissioner’s Cup.
Armed with a twice-to-beat advantage, No. 2 TNT made short work of seventh seed and foreign guest team Eastern 109-93 in their quarterfinals clash Thursday last week.
Rain or Shine needed three grueling games to oust fellow independent side Comverge 112-103 in the deciding tiff last Sunday.
If there’s one thing Reyes sees as a big factor going in his troops’ favor is the 16-day break to give way to Gilas Pilipinas’ drive in the third and final window of the FIBA Asia Cup qualifiers.
“So, it’s going to be a tough test, really, really tough test for us,” Reyes said. “Fortunately, we have a pretty long break coming up and it’s going to be incumbent upon us to take advantage of that break.”
But the pro league’s respite can also be Jekyll and Hyde—gunner Calvin Oftana is part of the Gilas quintet and will miss some practices with the Tropang Giga.
“That’s a factor that we have to consider and like I said, we have to meet as a staff first because we haven’t thought about it at all. I haven’t even thought about what to do in this long break,” Reyes said.
“So, we have to reconvene first before I can answer that. But certainly, that’s going to be a factor, Calvin, not being with us to practice.”
