Monday, January 12, 2015

Will Junemar Fajardo become PBA's Patrick Ewing?


Junemar Fajardo is blessed with height, heft, and skills to become one of the best Filipino basketball players of all time. He won an MVP title in his second year and he continues to dominate the league. He is probably on his way to another MVP this year and he is expected to win more. The only thing that is lacking for him now is a PBA title.  

Ever since he took the league by storm two years ago, his team never won a title.  They have been in the finals and they lost. The San Miguel Beermen is now trailing the Alaska Aces 1-2 in their best of seven PBA Philippine Cup Finals. Based on the way they are playing, the Beermen is being out hustled by the Aces who seem to want the title more.  Will "The Kraken" and the Beermen lose again?

If Junemar Fajardo loses then he slowly becoming a Philippine version of Patrick Ewing or Karl Malone. It is hard to imagine because a team have 3 chances every year to win a title in the PBA unlike the NBA which can crown 1 team only every year.  In his 6 conferences so far, Fajardo dominated stats but he never won a championship. Last year, it was the year of Tim Cone and the San Mig Coffee who had grand slam. Alex Mallari has now 4 titles while Junemar has none. They were both drafted by Petron 2 years ago. 

San Miguel Beer is like the LA Lakers or New York Knicks  of the PBA.  The expectations are always high.  It is a big pressure for any coach or player to don the San Miguel jersey. The win-now attitude partnered with disappointing endings have cost jobs of many good coaches and players.  The losing spell for San Miguel even cost them their Petron Blaze name. 

Can Junemar survive such environment? When do you think will he win his first PBA title? Will he wait as long as Jun Limpot? There is a big possibility that the wait will be long as long as San Miguel keep on tinkering its line up and coaching after bad conference.  Their method of trying to dominate the PBA by getting all the All-Star caliber players even if the PBA has "salary cap" has somewhat backfired because the team never developed the chemistry that teams like Alaska Aces and Rain or Shine Elasto Painters have. Those 2 teams have won more with less. Hopefully, San Miguel develop some sort of championship identity and shed the "larong mayaman" image. If not then someone will retire with 5 MVPs and ZERO titles. :)

1 comment:

  1. I am glad I found this article! I enjoy reading sports satire! It is always fun to have a good laugh while reading about something you enjoy, like sports. I wish I could find more places I could read this kind of satire. I will have to do a little more looking around to find them!
    Emily Smith | http://www.notsportscenter.com

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