Air21 ousts SMB in double OT thriller

Air21 has had two games in the PBA Commissioner’s Cup where it blew commanding leads in the fourth quarter to lose.
On Friday night, the Express felt how gratifying it was to come climbing out of such a hole, doing it against arguably the most talented team on paper in San Miguel Beer to make a semifinal series for the first time in franchise history.
“I’m speechless right now, I really am,” Air21 coach Franz Pumaren said after steering his Express to a 101-95 double overtime victory over the Beermen in their knockout match at the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao.
“This team just didn’t want to lose,” he continued. “The players really worked so hard for this victory.” The Express were 10 points down with 2:04 remaining in the fourth quarter and found a hero in the 41-year-old Asi Taulava, who forged the first extension at 82-all after hitting a putback of a Wesley Witherspoon miss at the end of regulation.
Taulava also scored the first five points of the Express in the second overtime, giving them the control they needed to fend off the Beermen in the final stretch and be a semifinalist-in-waiting.
San Miguel, which came into the playoffs as the second-seeded team needing to beat the Express just once to make the Final Four, thus became the ninth team in the league ever to blow such an advantage.
And the Beermen only have themselves to blame after failing to hold on to that 10-point lead and not getting their import, Kevin Jones, in the offensive flow starting late in the fourth quarter.
San Miguel also played the extensions without June Mar Fajardo, Marcio Lassiter and Sol Mercado, who all fouled out one after the other.
And with Fajardo out of the equation starting the final 38 seconds of the fourth quarter, Taulava was able to throw his weight around the shaded lane and come up with his heroics, starting with that follow-up of a Witherspoon win for the first overtime.
Taulava finished with 16 points, nine rebounds and three blocks in 45 minutes and was undoubtedly the hero of the game, though Sean Anthony also was brilliant for the second straight game.
Anthony, who scored 25 points in a 102-93 Game 1 win, had 18 points and 12 rebounds aside from playing pesky defense on Chris Ross that disrupted the San Miguel offense.
Witherspoon finished with 23 points and four blocks.
“The experts didn’t give us a chance against this San Miguel team.” Pumaren, who was a vital part of the SMB squad that won the Grand Slam in 1989, said. “But we were able to prove something: that with team effort, we were able to survive.” Air21, which is playing under the three-year-old shopinas.com franchise, will await the winner of the Alaska-San Mig Coffee series as a Final Four foe.
The Aces and the Mixers lock horns one final time this conference in their own rubber match at 5:15 p.m. today also at the Big Dome in Cubao.
Rain or Shine and Meralco tangle in the other game at 2:45 p.m. with the winner advancing to face Talk ‘N Text in a similar best-of-five Final Four series.
Meanwhile, Rain or Shine coach Yeng Guiao was fined P100,000 by the Office of the Commissioner yesterday for calling Meralco’s Cliff Hodge a ‘mongoloid’ after their physical Game 2 won by the Elasto Painters on Wednesday.
Hodge, who got the ire of Guiao after hitting Raymond Almazan with a closed fist in a rebound play in the dying seconds, was also fined P20,000 for that foul, which was upgraded into a Flagrant Foul 2 infraction.