There was a bump on the road in the Green Archers’ march to the finals—and now, what had earlier looked inevitable in their quest of the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) season crown could turn out to be a disastrous fall for the suddenly mortal Taft Avenue warriors.
They got nearly tripped by the back-to-the-wall Falcons, forced into 26 errors and only three assists by the fourth-ranked team in the Final Four of the UAAP series. It seemed that the La Salle team that had giant-size swagger in the preliminary round had vanished. The team that had gone on a 13-1 winning roll has become a heap of characterless players, a spectacle of fumbling also-rans who looked everything but heroic.
Basketball, a team sport, could not be won on three assists, which is a desecration of the game’s basic tenet. Most Green Archers’ fans will not like what I have to say, but I believe this to be true. La Salle did not win the game on Wednesday. It was Adamson that lost it, and it went down ruefully after keeping the UAAP season’s most wondrous squad on tenterhooks for most of the night.
The scary win meant that for La Salle to pull this one out, it had to dig in, bank heavily on the brilliance of its Cameroonian center Ben Mbala and benefit from the timely heroics of a resurrected senior scorer, Jeron Teng, who redeemed himself down the stretch from a dismal first half.
La Salle Coach Aldin Ayo had the look of a bench tactician about to have a heart attack until the final 120 seconds-plus of the game. That came after the Archers had committed the last of their errors, an eight-second violation, and before the Falcons’ brilliant game from the long court disintegrated into a spate of shooting woes from three-point range.
A solitary point separated the Archers from the Falcons, who threatened last at 65-64 on Rob Manalang’s four free throws before the clutch-shooting Teng, atoning for seven errors in the first half, made four points on a jumper and two free throws. These were the last of his top-scoring 25 points and rescued from the gallows the bloodied, harassed and now visibly shaken, if not fear-stricken, Green Archers.
Not so used to watching his boys get rattled, Coach Ayo used only mild, not apocalyptic language, in describing their near-meltdown. “We were not executing our game plan,” he observed, and described the whole affair as a “horrible game”.
It didn’t look that way to the Falcons’ fans at the Mall of Asia Arena. What was more obvious was the Falcons’ sharp form. It was they, not the Archers, that had fire in the belly, the aggressor and harasser and the hungrier team, out as they were to prove that being the fourth team in the Final Four cast was no impediment to greatness.
The Falcons turned the game into a heart-stopper, as promised by Franz Pumaren, in former times the fair-haired poster boy of La Salle’s basketball eminence. Their harassing defense threw the Archers’ offense off-balance, with their ball-carriers and passers coming under intense pressure. In their 26th error of the night down the stretch, they were unable to get the ball past the midcourt line in eight seconds and turned over ball possession.
It mattered to them that Mbala came out smoking for the entire night. His statistical lines of 21 points, 16 rebounds and four blocks—a Most Valuable Player (MVP) performance by any measure—stood out, but it also resurrected some preseason doubts about the Archers’ character.
Ayo seemed only too aware about this—about the frailties of a team that had the look of invincibility but whose players could turn into different creatures in front of television cameras.
His Archers often were a different team in practice.
“Bakit kapag may camera na, kapag may TV na, may crowd na, bakit nag-iiba ‘yung galaw nila?” Ayo told an online reporter on Wednesday.
“Bakit may mga players na ayaw mamasa kapag may TV na, kapag may camera na. ‘Yun ‘yung problema namin,” he said.
As it makes its first finals appearance since the 76th season against either Ateneo or Far Eastern, La Salle has no choice but prove it is a team rather than a collection of spoiled college stars.
Its road to the crown no longer looks irreversible.