Last week, the Alaska Aces took an overtime decision over the San Miguel Beermen. They withstood an all-out late 4th quarter run led by Arwind Santos who put up 22 pts and 14 rebs. It was a pretty big effort on their end as Willie Miller wasn't playing well. Thankfully, the other half of the league's top backcourt, LA Tenorio responded wth 29 pts and 5 asts. Tenorio has been playing well as of late and some would say is actually a candidate for the Best Player of the Conference and year-end MVP awards due to his much improved and stellar performance this season.
What people often forget about that game is that, in a rare moment of negligence, Coach Tim Cone, actually called for Joe Devance to miss his second free throw and allow SMB to rebound the ball with time left and them only leading by 2. The rare error by the multi-titled coach was that he thought the Beermen had no timeouts left and could not advance the ball. This cost them an extra-difficult 5 minutes of additional court time as Dondon Hontiveros received a backpick and took an alley-oop to tie the game.
Wednesday, the Aces seemed to be on the other end of a beatdown from Talk n Text and down deep into the 4th. Jimmy Alapag played the role of Willie Miller as he was absent due to a hamstring injury. Similarly, Mac Cardona rattled off 32 points to play LA Tenorio and carried the team late in the game. Alaska would stage a comeback and with around 2 seconds left, the game was tied and it was Aces ball.
Coach Tim picked up from the brillance of Coach Siot Tanquincen in their previous game and drew up a pretty familiar play. LA Tenorio, similar to Hontiveros, was given a backpick at the elbow and was spotted by Tony Dela Cruz for an alley-oop lay-up! Eeriely familiar? Alaska was up 2 points and they won the game as there was only 0.5 seconds left on the clock.
Now, in the stats, that assist was credited to Dela Cruz. I'd personally give it to Coach Siot.
Thanks to that, Alaska now sports an 11-1 record, leading the entire league.
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