Basketball
Rafe Bartholomew on the Commissioner’s Cup: The big boys are back!
AKTV/Paolo Papa
Yes, we all know and agree that an all-Filipino conference championship ring is the league’s most precious bauble. When a team wins an import conference, it’s not quite the same. Fans and critics can always tack an asterisk next to the winning squad’s name in the record book and drop excuses like “Alaska had Diamon Simpson. Over-height daw siya.” Or, “Crispa had Billy Ray Bates. With him, Black Superman wasn’t a nickname; it was the truth.”
Such cop-outs aren’t available when your team loses the all-Filipino tournament. Their locals beat yours.
But you know what? I don’t care. I love import conferences. The first PBA game I ever saw — live or on television — was during the 2005 Fiesta Conference. I bought tickets at the Araneta Coliseum box office and sat down to watch Air 21 play the San Miguel Beermen.
I’d been living in the Philippines for a week, and I really had no clue what was going on. I had heard somewhere that each team was supposed to have one import, and I stared at San Miguel’s lineup, with Danny Seigle, Dorian Pena, and Kwan Johnson, wondering how they all landed on the same roster. Seigle looked great, and I spent most of the game thinking that he was the import.
Roly-poly Shawn Daniels, meanwhile, left little mystery as to who was Air 21′s import, but I felt mystified nonetheless, because I couldn’t figure out how a professional basketball player could be as overweight as Daniels was. (For the record, it didn’t take long for Daniels to win me over with his fast hands and clever passing. As he returned to the PBA, year after year, I came to think of him as one of the league’s most effective imports.)
But I don’t love import conferences just because they provided my first glimpse of a league I grew to love. I love import conferences because they can be so volatile, unpredictable, and occasionally downright crazy. Many of my clearest PBA memories come from import conferences: Marquin Chandler’s smooth-as-taho pull-up jumper; Rashad Bell mouthing obscenities and strangling the air in front of him after his Coca Cola Tigers blew a 4-point lead with 13.3 seconds to play in the 2007 playoffs; James Yap running for his life from Terrence Leather in 2008; and Anthony Grundy getting fondled by Mark Yee in the finals of last year’s Governor’s Cup.
In the Commissioner’s Cup that began last week, the PBA is trying something they’ve only done a handful of times in the last decade. The league has removed the height limit for imports; instead of the usual slate of 6-foot-6-and-under reinforcements, teams are free to hire legit seven-footers.
The last unlimited height import conference was in 2008, and the four-year gap between that tournament and the current one isn’t totally coincidental. In 2007, the Chot Reyes-coached RP team lost in the group stage of that year’s FIBA Asia Championships, so the PBA removed the height limit for the following year’s import conference.
League officials explained that exposing local players to seven-footers would better prepare them for the big men they’d face in international competition. Last year, the SMART-Gilas Pilipinas national team made it to the semifinals of FIBA Asia, but again fell short of earning an Olympic bid. So here we are again, the following year, opening the gates for all sorts of Brobdingnagian monsters to clog the lanes at Araneta, Ynares, and Cuneta.
I’m not totally sold on the logic behind improving the Philippine team’s performance by way of unlimited height import conferences in the PBA. The imports usually guard each other, so there’s a limit to the number of extra reps Sonny Thoss or Rob Reyes or Japeth Aguilar will get matched up with an import with the size and skill of FIBA Asia big men. But then again, it can’t hurt to have local pros, some of whom will be called on to bolster the national team’s next generation, play against bigger imports, so let’s give the PBA the benefit of the doubt and assume that Philippine basketball will benefit from another unlimited height conference.
The PBA has traditionally kept the import height limit around 6-foot-6, since experience has proved that players in this range produce the most entertaining basketball. The talent pool at 6-foot-6 — give or take an inch — is deep, and it includes a variety of types of players who have been successful in the league: From the rotund, defensive-minded glue guy Shawn Daniels, to burly post scorers like Jai Lewis, to all-world athletes like Paul Harris, to Gabe Freeman, the Energizer Bunny’s skin-and-bones cousin with great offensive skills. And to the handful of PBA fans who have grown accustomed to an annual visit from Anthony Johnson, don’t fret — he’s draining threes and slashing along the baseline for the ABL’s Philippine Patriots.
Talent is more scarce for an unlimited height conference. There just aren’t that many 7-foot-tall men who can run up and down a court, catch a basketball, and (hopefully) shoot it through a 10-foot hoop.
The few who really do it well earn millions of dollars in the NBA; historically, recruiting serviceable 6-foot-10-and-up imports has been a challenge in the PBA. In one of the first interviews I conducted in the Philippines, Ronnie Magsanoc (then an assistant at Purefoods) told me that he’d never seen a team have so much trouble finding an import as the then-Chunkee Giants did in a 2005 unlimited height conference. Big man after big man flew in, plodded around the court ineffectively, then was replaced. Over ten games, Purefoods had cycled through six imports.
The 2012 Commissioner’s Cup is just 4 games old, and already teams have been bitten by the import swap bug. In fact, before a single game had been played, Alaska, Meralco, and Rain or Shine had all dumped their imports for other American big men.
Nothing made me sadder than to see Jake Voskuhl and Jelani McCoy go. I remembered both players from their college careers, at the University of Connecticut and UCLA, respectively. The idea that these two solid big men were now too ancient to be useful in the PBA reminded me of a sad, creeping reality — that I’m a couple months away from turning 30, and before long, I won’t be worth much in my local men’s league, either.
It probably won’t be long before Jake and Jelani are joined by a fresh round of rejects, either. The nine-game elimination schedule, together with a playoff format that only allows the top six teams into the postseason, is a formula for heavy import turnover. A 0-2 start puts a team at serious risk of not making the playoffs. Begin the conference 0-3 and it’s curtains.
Even Nick Fazekas, who put up 37 points and 18 rebounds in his first game, a 2-point loss to Ginebra, could find himself on the chopping block if Petron doesn’t win their next game. Teams just don’t have time for patience. It’s smarter to roll the dice with a brand new big man than stay the course with an import who’s not winning games.
Now that we understand the import landscape in this conference, allow me to hand out three meaningless preseason awards:
The Blasphemy Award: Goes to Marcus Douthit, the American reinforcement who became a naturalized Filipino and turned in a brilliant and steady performance for SMART-Gilas in last year’s FIBA-Asia tournament.
This sounds insane, but couldn’t Douthit be replaced as Air 21′s import? The team went winless in the all-Filipino, and if they start out 0-3 or 0-4 in this conference, don’t they have to try to find another import? I hear Dwight Howard wants to leave the Orlando Magic, and although I’m quite positive the Air21 Express are not on the list of teams Howard is willing to play for, he might be the only big man alive who can tow Homer Se and Magi Sison to the promised land.
The Long Shot Award: Goes to Rain or Shine’s Duke Crews, who along with Meralco’s Jarrid Famous already makes this one of the best PBA seasons in recent memory for imports with cool names.
In name if not necessarily in game, they are throwbacks to the 1970s and 1980s imports with badass names like Cyrus Mann, Byron “Snake” Jones, and DeWayne Scales. But alas, poor Duke is my choice for the import most likely to be replaced.
It’s not his fault. The 6-foot-8 Crews attacked the basket, got to the free-throw line and put up fine numbers in Rain or Shine’s loss to Alaska on Sunday. But Crews is the shortest import in the league, and going small never seems to work in unlimited height conferences. Seven-footers like Adam Parada and Chris Alexander will score more easily over Rain or Shine’s big men than Crews will score from the perimeter against local defenders. Also, Crews plays for a Yeng Guiao team. Unless Coach Yeng has got a stud like Tony Harris or James Penny, he won’t think twice about bringing in new blood.
The Sympathy Awards: Go to Rain or Shine’s JR Quinahan and Beau Belga and Barako Bull’s Dorian Pena, and Mick Pennisi. As long as their teams have perimeter players as imports — the aforementioned Crews and Barako’s DerMarr Johnson — these local big men will have to body up against other teams’ taller, heavier imports.
I’m about the same height as Quinahan. The idea of boxing out Chris Alexander is making me hyperventilate right now. The members of Extra Rice Incorporated will definitely earn their additional scoops this conference. These are big, tough guys, but I feel their pain (and they will, too).
Rafe Bartholomew is the author of Pacific Rims, the seminal book about Philippine basketball, which he began working on shortly after falling in love with Shawn Daniels in 2005. He is currently an editor for Grantland. Follow him on Twitter for more basketball discussion.
