Four games in eight days.
That’s what Meralco will experience when it wraps up its elimination round campaign in the Philippine Basketball Association Governors’ Cup.
Bolts coach Norman Black said they are bracing for a grueling stretch as they chase one of the four spots in the playoffs of the season-ending conference.
“Just looking at the schedule, we have four games in eight days and this is the first step. We have Ginebra on Wednesday and then Converge on Friday and then Phoenix on Sunday,” Black said.
“All three games are really tough for us. But we thought this game against Magnolia is really important for us. We struggled throughout, but we just grinded it out.”
The Bolts are in the sixth spot of the team standings with a 5-3 win-loss mark behind TNT Tropang Giga, San Miguel Beer, NLEX, Converge and Barangay Ginebra San Miguel.
Eight teams will advance to the quarterfinals with the top four squads clinching the twice-to-beat incentive against lower-ranked team in the playoffs.
The survivors in the playoffs will advance to the best-of-five seminal round to determine who will make it to the best-of-seven finals series.
Black acknowledges that climbing the top four will not be easy so they have to emerge victorious in the killer stretch where they will face the Kings, the FiberXers and the Fuel Masters in the coming days after hurdling their first challenge via an 86-84 victory over Magnolia last Sunday at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
Black believes that they need to overcome a tough road ahead just to get back to where they belong.
After all, the Bolts had been in the championship round four times in the last five editions of the Governors’ Cup, making them the favorites to advance anew.
“All the teams are going through tough schedules at this point where they play a lot of games in a row, that’s mainly because of the scheduling of the FIBA-related events and some of the other activities that are going on,” Black said.
