There will be 17 days of rest before the Ateneo Blue Eagles plunge into action in Game 1 of the title series of the 82nd University Athletic Association of the Philippines men’s basketball tournament.
During that period, the team will focus finding out new game plans to deal with their opponents in the finals that’s set on Nov. 16.
“Well, we don’t have a break. Basically, for us it’s business as usual. We will just prepare our opponent specifically once we know who that is but in the meantime, we will work to build our basketball team. We will put some new stuff in that teams won’t be able to go back and review our films and say that we’re gonna see the same team,” said Blue Eagles coach Tab Baldwin.
During the next two weeks, fourth seed Far Eastern University meets no. 3 seed University of Santo Tomas on Wednesday at the start of the stepladder semis.
The winner will next take on the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons, who have a twice-to-beat incentive as the no. 2 seeded team.
“It’s not gonna be very difficult for us to get our focus on the playoffs and watch the stepladder take place and see who comes out of it. It’s gonna be tough for those teams. They’re all very strong and deserving teams, they all fought hard particularly in the second half of the season,” said Baldwin.
The Blue Eagles have achieved history after they completed an historic 14-game sweep of the eliminations.
And they did this after Angeli Kouame unloaded a season-high 20 points and grabbed 12 rebounds for the Blue Eagles in their 86-64 smothering of the University of the Philippines Fighting Maroons.
After that game, Thirdy Ravena emerged as one the team’s top performers with his averages of 12.93 points and 6.71 rebounds.
Kouame follows with his norms of 12.5 points and 11.79 boards.
“FEU had a great run, UP had a great, and UST has been fairly consistent all year long. I suspect that UP has the twice-to-beat advantage but we don’t really know who’s gonna pop out. But what I would like to say about our basketball team is there’s been a lot of talk about the UP team, a team that has a great heart. And I agree with that,” said Baldwin.