Rondae Hollis-Jefferson anticipated Barangay Ginebra’s ploy of letting him shoot from three-point distance, so he made them pay for it.
The do-it-all winger fired a PBA career-high six triples for 37 points, together with 13 rebounds and seven assists in 48 minutes to power TNT to a 96-84 win for the 2-0 lead in the Season 49 Governors’ Cup Finals, Wednesday night.
Since joining the league in 2023, he’s never shot more than three treys, but he made a conscious effort to fire from afar, as he wanted to make the Kings realize that their game plan may no longer work due to his improved accuracy.
It’s because the former NBA veteran already knew that he would be given that kind of treatment based on his own experience last year.
For starters, RHJ led Jordan to the men’s basketball final of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China. But they bowed to the Gilas of Tim Cone, 70-60, as the Philippines won its first gold medal in the said event in 61 years.
Hollis-Jefferson tallied 24 points in the title match but he still remembers the strategy used against him: let him shoot from deep. That worked for Gilas as he struggled to find the bottom of the net, especially in the waning moments.
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“I don’t know if you guys watched but in the Asian Games, they forced me to shoot a lot of threes, and they beat us in the gold medal game,” he recalled.
That’s why the 29-year-old made sure to be ready for it, which he proved on Wednesday night — much, of course, to the delight of the Tropang Giga.
“We talked about that, and I just shifted my mindset,” said Hollis-Jefferson, who only went 1-of-4 from beyond the first arc back in Game 1 last Sunday.
“I knew that was gonna be the game plan and they were willing to live with that for the whole game. I guess they thought that it was a fluke or it won’t happen [again],” he added.
“But I’m a professional player. I work on it every day.”
TNT as a whole nailed a total of 14 triples in the victory, two more than what they drilled last game as it is clearly the better shooting team in the series.
Ginebra, on the other hand, has so far made only nine treys on 48 attempts across two games. Justin Brownlee himself is 0-for-4 from the said area.
So, in another way to look at it, Hollis-Jefferson has almost matched their total threes made, and it’s mainly because of that shift in his mindset.
“And I believe in it,” the conference’s reigning Best Import said. “My teammates, coaches, they believe in me. They tell me to shoot.”
