Chot Reyes and The Cube are made for each other. It's the PBA's next love team. Reyes is Head Coach for Talk 'N Text. He displays emotion the only way a 47-year old wears a Topman hoodie; with commitment. The Cube is the new, swanky LED scoreboard inside the Araneta Coliseum. It shows everything – good calls, bad calls, superb shots and missed dunks – in high-definition. And Reyes and The Cube exist to make each other breathtaking. For better or for worse. While watching the tug-of-war between Talk 'N Text and B-Meg Derby Ace, you might forget Jorge Gallent. Gallent, the first-year Head Coach of B-Meg Derby Ace, plays the role of recluse. Like the casualty of an eclipse, he hides involuntarily, behind a gregarious counterpart. In the drama of a PBA playoff game, Gallent prefers to step away, Reyes chooses to go front and center.
If Reyes can grab a microphone during the game and launch an oratorical spree to contest a call or convince his players to play defense, he would. After miscues, he covers his face. After tough calls, he hops like, well me, during New Year's Eve. He raises both hands, his trademark sardonic style of surrender, with a smirk on his face and "working the refs" in his mind. The Cube captures everything for a sold-out Big Dome to see.
Reyes is the outgoing, outspoken Head Coach for these outgoing, outspoken times. He acts and yells like a madman by design. Go ahead and ask him. Yanking his team out of an ongoing playoff game, kneeling before referees and blurting out admittedly the league's most eloquent expletives during timeouts aren't crazy stunts. He uses them to win, if not today, then tomorrow.
Thus, if Reyes chooses to show his exasperation over a bungled endgame, not in the confines of the team's dugout, but right on the floor, on live television, in high-def, on The Cube, for all to see, then that's the plan. Perhaps, only a champion PBA coach who has lasted as long as he has understands. If he could grab his players' collective decision making in the final seconds of a one-point loss, place it on top of a wooden tee and smack it as hard as Tiger Woods on 10 cups of coffee, he would.
Reyes's twitter message after the game: "If we can't manage to call a timeout or get a decent shot with 10 seconds left and five top-caliber players on the floor, then we don't deserve to win."
Even when Reyes grumbles, it becomes a social event. Whatever happened to "the players win games and coaches lose them" adage? Ah but it's 2011 peeps and tweeps; the age of the outgoing and the outspoken. Reyes is just the coach to lead the charge. Hence, if someone posts his message on The Cube during Game 3, for his players to ingest, for all to examine, it just might, depending on the outcome of the series, validate a winner's genius or coach's madness.
Mico Halili, GMA News
