Coaching... a thankless job

In a move that some of its fans were long expecting (even clamoring for), the Barangay Ginebra Kings revamped its coaching staff by getting Siot Tanquincen (an assistant coach of its sister team, SMB) to replace ‘the Triggerman’ Allan Caidic as their head coach in the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA). Caidic, in turn was “elevated” to the position of Team Manager.

Throughout his coaching carreer, Caidic has received countless criticisms, mostly for his failure to win a championship for Ginebra, which is widely considered as the most popular team in the country. He did manage to lead the team to the championship round of the 2001 All-Filipino Cup (where they were defeated, 4-2 by SMB), but had little success afterwards. This is in contrast to his playing days when the Triggerman enjoyed numerous successes in his entire playing career (named as one of the 25 greatest players in PBA history, multiple national team appearances, 1990 PBA MVP, countless championships, scoring titles, mythical team selections, scoring records, 3-point king, etc etc). I myself, was an avid fan of the Triggerman when he was shooting the lights out of any gym that he stepped in.

Last year, expectations of the fans were high because they all agreed that Ginebra finally had a complete and a very talented team that was capable of dominating the league. They had players like Eric Menk, Jun Limpot, Rommel Adducul, Mark Caguioa, and Bal David leading their charge, and their bench was nothing to be squawked at either. But unfortunately, they never even got close to the Championship round in any of the three tournaments that were staged by the PBA that year. Much of the flak of course went to the head coach. Their failure was not really attributed to the fact that the players played way below the level that was expected of them.

Ron Jacobs, another former coach, who would have been the coach of the Philippine national basketball team to the 2002 Asian Games had he not gone down due to ailment several months prior to the games, said it best several years ago, “Players win games, Coaches lose them”.