STANLEY PRINGLE has yet to fully recover from a knee injury but the way he played against the Hong Kong Bay Area Dragons on Sunday night, he looked fine and every inch lethal.
“He’s our own ‘little secret weapon,’” Barangay Ginebra San Miguel head coach Tim Cone told the post-Game 5 press conference following the Gin Kings’ 101-91 victory that gave them a 3-2 lead in the Philippine Basketball Association Commissioner’s Cup Finals at the Mall of Asia Arena.
“They [Dragons] don’t know the history of Stanley [Pringle] a year ago or two or three years ago—how dynamic he can be—so he’s our ‘little secret weapon’ off the bench,” Cone added.
Playing limited minutes because of a left knee meniscus injury he suffered during last year’s Governors’ Cup, the 6-foot-1 spitfire guard averaged a measly 5.25 points, 3.0 rebounds and 1.25 assists in only four games before the Finals.
But on Sunday night, Pringle, 35, showed his true form and scored 20 points on 7 of 13 shooting from the field. He made six three-pointers—two of them dousing water on the Dragons’ last-ditch uprising—and also hauled down five rebounds.
Cone said the team’s been extra cautious of Pringle that the coaching staff have to monitor his minutes.
“He’s not a 100 percent yet … everyone can tell,” Cone said. “But his 90 percent is better than most guys in the league and so we are trying to monitor his minutes off the bench, bring him up off the bench, he is a natural starter.”
Cone started using Pringle sparingly last June to add depth in Ginebra’s bench and to relieve Scottie Thompson and LA Tenorio.
But Pringle has proven his on call anytime when needed.
“We can go to big moments even though he is not 100 percent yet at this point.” Cone said. “So he’s definitely a weapon out there, he is a weapon that Bay Area hasn’t seen really because he’s not playing heavy minutes.”
Pringle ably backed up Best Import Justin Brownlee’s huge game of 37 points and eight rebounds and Japeth Aguilar’s 12 points in Game 5.
Pringle gets a two-day respite for his knee with Ginebra hoping to end the best-of-seven series in Game 6 scheduled at 5:45 p.m. Wednesday at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
Ginebra willed its way in Game 5, but the Gin Kings had to stave off a final minutes uprising by the Dragons.
Witnessed by a crowd of 21,823, the Gin Kings controlled the game in the third quarter where they led by as many as 18 points.
But the Dragons clawed their way back to a five-point deficit only to be stopped on their tracks by back-to-back Pringle triples, a Thompson completed steal for a fastbreak play and a Japeth Aguilar slam.