San Miguel Beer was coming off a two-week break, and the last game the Beermen played wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination.

That’s why Todd Purves, the active American assistant coach of the Beermen, didn’t have an inkling of how the team would be coming out of that break against a classy team like San Mig Coffee.

Shaking off the rust of that layoff in just one quarter, the Beermen gave Purves a truly impressive answer.

Kevin Jones scored 26 points and had 16 rebounds and Marcio Lassiter was deadly all night as the duo led the Beermen to a dominating 97-88 victory over the Mixers to move within another win of claiming the second twice-to-beat privilege in the PBA Commissioner’s Cup playoffs.

“To tell you guys frankly, I didn’t know how we would come out after two weeks of rest,” Purves told scribes later. “We did our best to prepare. We were mentally tough enough to come back against an outstanding team like San Mig Coffee.

“Unless proven otherwise, I still think San Mig Coffee is the team to beat,” Purves said after steering the Beermen to their sixth win in eight matches.

San Miguel has Air21 as its last foe and the Beermen can sew up No. 2 ranking – and the second twice-to-beat privilege – with a win and avoid any complications of a playoff.

As things stand, San Mig Coffee still has a chance despite dropping to 4-3 and into a tie with idle Alaska. Both can still catch the Beermen at 6-3 if the Express triumph and if the Aces and the Mixers sweep their remaining two games in this round.

In case of a triple tie for No. 2, the team with the lowest quotient will automatically be the No. 4 qualifier, with the other two teams clashing in a KO match to determine No. 2 and relegate the loser as No. 3.

Talk ‘N Text, which swept the eliminations two nights after after a 92-91 nipping of Globalport, earned No. 1 spot even before the All-Star break and will battle No. 8, needing to win just once to make the semifinal round.

The Beermen wriggled free from a tight game in the second quarter, their breakaway aided somewhat by an unfortunate back injury to San Mig’s Marc Pingris, the Mixers’ defensive anchor.

Doug Kramer, the chief reliever of June Mar Fajardo at the center spot for San Miguel, accidentally hit Pingris at the back and the San Mig forward wasn’t able to return, seeing action for just a total of 14 minutes.

Lassiter scored nine of his total in the second period and Chris Ross was at the firing end for San Miguel in the third as the Beermen built leads of as large as 18 points to easily thwart several rallies by the Mixers the rest of the way.

Fajardo finished with 15 points that went with nine rebounds and two blocks, making life difficult for the Mixers inside the paint with his intimidating presence.

James Mays scored just 15 points and shared team scoring honors with Peter June Simon for the Mixers, who dropped to 4-3, now tied with Alaska.

The Aces can start working on sweeping their remaining two games Sunday when they battle struggling crowd-favorite Barangay Ginebra at 5:15 p.m. at the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao.

This game is also important for the Gin Kings, who would also need no less than victories in their last two games to avoid qualifying in the bottom half of the standings and drawing either the first or second-ranked teams in the quarterfinals.

Ginebra is at 3-4 and another loss would more or less doom the Kings to the bottom.

Meanwhile, Barako Bull tries to fan its fading hopes of advancing alive when the Energy battle winless Globalport in the 3 p.m. contest.