The San Miguel Beermen have not raised a PBA trophy in four conferences over the past three years. For the league's most successful franchise, the winner of eight of the last 18 titles since 2014, this amounts to a serious drought.
The descent from near-unbeatable status to whatever the Beermen have been during this stretch is a substantial failure in and of itself. Obviously, San Miguel is far from pleased.
"We have too much talent to not be able to win a championship every conference," SMB veteran guard Chris Ross told ESPN during the PBA's Media Day at Novotel Manila on Thursday.
A stacked Beermen roster -- bolstered on Monday by Robbie Herndon via a sign-and-trade deal from the Converge FiberXers -- will now aim to reclaim the Philippine Cup, a trophy they won a record five straight seasons from 2014 to 2019.
The 28-year-old Herndon does not possess the same name recognition as most of his teammates, but he adds a lot of value to this roster as a capable scorer (14.3 points on 42.7 percent shooting through four seasons) and a career 34.5 percent shooter from deep on over 2.7 attempts. His 3-point shooting could even rise as he plays on a team that already has bonafide shot-creators in All-Stars Terrence Romeo, CJ Perez, Marcio Lassiter, Jericho Cruz, Vic Manuel, and Mo Tautuaa, as well as highly-capable backups Simon Enciso, Rodney Brondial, Von Pessumal, and Paul Zamar.
The deal is also a statement of sorts: Anything less than a title is still unacceptable; not for a team so used to winning, not for a team filled to the brim with a wide array of talented options, and certainly not for a Beermen squad that ticks both boxes.
It's been nothing but tough sledding for San Miguel since falling short in a Grand Slam bid in the 2019 season. Losing Fajardo and Romeo to separate injuries dashed their championship chances from the onset of the 2020 season, but having them back in 2021 did not boost their postseason hopes. More injuries and a roster in flux shook the stability of a previously solid foundation.
In last season's All-Filipino Conference, the Beermen briefly looked like the conquerors of old and even pushed eventual champion TNT Tropang Giga to the very brink in a hard-fought semifinals matchup. However, they eventually fell short of a return trip to the finals as Romeo (calf) and Tautuaa (knee) were hobbled by lumps that forced them to miss the last two quarters of an all-important Game 7.
Shortly after a dismal end to the first conference of the season, San Miguel management blew up the vaunted "Death Five" of Fajardo, Ross, Lassiter, Arwind Santos, and Alex Cabagnot by trading away the latter two to NorthPort and Terrafirma for Manuel and Enciso, respectively. But like many hastily-formed units that used talent to compensate for fit and chemistry, the ploy backfired and only resulted in an unceremonious quarterfinals exit in the following Governors' Cup.
"For the longest time, it was the 'Death Five', right? We knew everything about each other. You take one piece out of that, it's hard. Take two pieces? It makes it even more challenging, especially now that we've added a lot of guys, a lot of talent that have to be on the court," Ross said.
Add a couple of more issues -- like when Ross, San Miguel's defensive leader, had to miss time because his father died -- and the Beermen found it hard to fulfill their win-now directives.
"It's hard when you kind of just have to plug and play when games are coming fast and you guys don't have time to jell and practice," Ross lamented. "It's hard when you're in the middle of the season or the conference and you expect them to know how we play, and vice versa."
Fortunately, SMB gets to wipe the slate clean. With a (relatively) full offseason in the books and the new 2022-23 season coming up, all of those problems can be history.
"Just having the time to kind of learn about each other and play with each other and just learn what each other likes or doesn't like, that was big for us," Ross said. "Now that we've been able to kind of figure things out, we don't have any more excuses. We have a talented lineup, we've had time to build chemistry. There are no more excuses."
The word "chemistry" was frequently thrown around by head coach Leo Austria when discussing what went wrong for San Miguel last year and what they primarily worked on during the short break that lasted for about 11 weeks.
"We were able to have some time to develop our team in terms of chemistry. This time, we had more time to prepare and figure out what's wrong with us, and it came out that we really had problems in terms of cohesiveness and chemistry," Austria told reporters.
As encouraging as that may sound, the Beermen know that all of that will only remain lip service until they prove they are finally on the same page.
It's a good thing they won't run out of opportunities to do just that early in the season. With Romeo missing the start of the Philippine Cup after being indefinitely sidelined by back spasms, there appears to be an expectation that the rest of the holdovers in the talent-laden backcourt -- Perez, Cruz, Lassiter, Enciso, and new recruit Herndon -- can and will pick up the slack.
"He was not able to practice in the last few weeks because of his back spasms, but he's already started his rehabilitation and therapy for him to catch up to this conference. We're giving him ample time to recover 100 percent," said Austria.
"But I talked to the team before and informed them about Terrence, and everybody was upbeat about stepping up," the coach continued. "We don't know yet if 'yung impact talagang malaki sa amin because there are players who can contribute, who could score like him or who could defend better than him. But medyo inspired sila because the loss of Terrence in the first few games means it will give additional time to the minutes of other players. So they're preparing for that."
There's also the need to be much better on defense compared to how they were last year. Per Stats by Ryan on Tiebreaker Times, San Miguel posted a defensive rating of 103.5 (eighth among 12 teams) despite having a tremendous point-of-attack defender in Ross, the league leader in steals (2.0) who ranked third among all players in the database's Defensive Box Plus-Minus.
"We talked about that in our team building, about our defense," the two-time Defensive Player of the Year said. "We know that defense wins championships, and we have a lot of capable defenders. I've kind of challenged everyone to be better on that end of the floor. With the talent that we have, offense will come easily as long as we play defense. The guys and I are challenging each other. I like what I'm seeing, and I feel like defensively we should be one of the better teams moving forward."
Hurdling these challenges should put San Miguel in a good position to finally meet the outsized expectations of this loaded roster -- one that, in Ross' words, is always in "championship or bust" mode.
"Every time we don't win a championship, that's a failure," he said. "It's been three years since we last won a championship. I think our time is now. It's due."