Justin Brownlee doesn’t want to use physicality as an excuse after being held to one of his worst showings ever in Game 2 of the PBA Governors’ Cup Finals.
The three-time Best Import was limited to just 12 points on a poor 3-of-16 shooting from the field in Ginebra’s 95-82 defeat to TNT Wednesday and that was large in part because of the way he was defended by their rivals all night.
He was on the receiving end of an F1 infraction following a drive to the lane barely two minutes into the match, and would go on to be hounded by counterpart Rondae Hollis-Jefferson as he was indeed a marked man.
Brownlee, though, knows that it comes with the territory, thus his refusal to pin the blame on physical play that led to such a performance.
“I can’t say that affected me,” he told reporters moments after emerging from the team’s dugout inside the SMART Araneta Coliseum. “But I guess you can say that they were successful in doing that. so I guess so, in a way.
“But you know, we’ve been here multiple times, so we understand teams have done it in the past. We execute well, we pass the ball, we share the ball as a team, so you know, teams try to keep us away from that,” added the 34-year-old, who’s gunning for his seventh championship.
“And being physical is definitely one way to keep us from that.”
Based on the numbers provided by league stats chief Fidel Mangonon III, Brownlee equalled his third-lowest output in a PBA game, and his uncharacteristic 18.8-percent field goal shooting is his worst in any game.
He went 0-for-5 from the 3-point area, which put an end to his 77-game streak with at least one trey made dating back to the 2019 Governors’ Cup.
Yet despite all that, the Kings still made it a close affair, most especially down the stretch. They roared back from a 16-point second-quarter deficit and chopped it to just four points, 82-78, with 6:18 to go in the final chapter.
That, until Roger Pogoy and Mikey Williams bannered TNT’s 13-4 finishing kick on the way to tying the best-of-7 series at one game apiece.
Brownlee, though, believes that his Barangay could have played and executed better than they did. But he isn’t one to cry over spilled milk, and the naturalized cager didn’t take anything away from the opposition.
“I feel like we could’ve come out, and played a whole lot better, mostly myself. I felt like I kinda let my team down as their import. I had good moments in other areas but … I just gotta be better. Three-for-sixteen? I just gotta be better in that field,” he said.
“You gotta give Talk N Text a lot of credit though, they switched up their game plan as far as the way they guarded me. Jefferson had a great game on both sides of the floor. Yeah, just gotta give them a lot of credit.”
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The 2023 PBA Governors Cup Finals is live-streamed on SMART Sports.
