Cone knows Hotdogs hold the aces

There was one thing ominously different in the Press Room after an Alaska game Sunday night – the chair reserved for the eloquent Tim Cone stood empty even until everyone covering the Philippine Basketball Association beat had packed up and left.

Obviously, the brainy American mentor is beginning to feel the heat.

It’s time to quit talking to the media for a while and concentrate on drawing up the battle plan, renew it if you will. For Purefoods, after all, has done such a wonderful job in getting back at the Samsung Governors Cup title series fight.

With a 2-0 lead now history and with pressure on his shoulders now more than ever, Cone left the Araneta Coliseum without anyone noticing him.

He could have spent hours talking things with his coaching staff or, he could have spent all those minutes trying to prop up the sagging spirits of his Aces.

Whatever he did, the series that predicted Purefoods to be the favorite has turned to that, and everything, it seems, has suddenly been difficult for Alaska.

Alaska will be trying to win for the first time in three games when the crucial fifth game of the best-of-seven series is played at 6:30 tonight, obviously aware of the fact that another stumble could well mean the end of this title playoff.

The Tender Juicy Hotdogs have won the last two games of the series and are looking prime and fit to win at least another one, unless of course, Cone comes up with something that could very well stop the Purefoods juggernaut.

Purefoods is aiming to become the first team in 20 years to ever come back from 0-2 deficit and win a best-of-seven championship series after the defunct Toyota Super Corollas in the 1982 Reinforced Conference against San Miguel.

And the way Purefoods has been playing of late, coupled with the inconsistency seen from the Aces have left many to concede that the feat is indeed doable.

"Coming into this game, the only thing we wanted was to tie this series up and not think about the next game so much," ‘Ryan Gregorio of Purefoods said. "The pressure could be on them, but we are not about to rest on that and be complacent."

"Hard work got us this far and we don’t intend to work less even with what we have at the moment."

Even before the series started, Cone has always said that the key to stopping Purefoods was stopping Derrick Brown from putting up big numbers on the board.

The Game 4 development backed up that theory as Brown, after being named the Best Import of the tournament, fired 46 points and grabbed 10 rebounds in an 82-76 victory.

The media will vividly remember Cone, when he talked of stopping Brown for four games in the series, four games to earn the magic number of victories that would mean the Uytengsu Franchise’s first title in the New Millennium.

Cone threw in everything – including the kitchen sink — Sunday night but didn’t have much success against Brown, unlike in the first two games of the series when he successfully limited the prolific import to almost harmless numbers.

Instead, it was Gregorio who pulled a rabbit out his hat in Roger Yap, the sophomore off-guard who is playing with a lot of responsibility and has so far done a wonderful job.

Yap has successfully limited Ron Riley’s production, and together with that the whole offense of Alaska has gone in disarray.