THREE TO GO
- Lassiter needs three triples to reset league mark, and record watch begins with Beermen-Kings showdown
Marcio Lassiter will have a chance to hit the most important triples of his PBA career this coming Sunday.
The San Miguel sniper is now two three-point makes from matching Jimmy Alapag’s record for most field goals made from beyond the arc—and three conversions from becoming the new king himself.
“Waking up that morning is going to be different, I bet,” Lassiter told the Inquirer on his way out of Smart Araneta Coliseum on Friday night.
“My son’s the biggest one [to egg me on],” he added of his firstborn Montae, who is now with Far Eastern University’s Junior High School program. “He’s been telling me what I should do and even what I should say [afterward].”
Lassiter’s date with immortality couldn’t come at a better moment. His chance to eclipse TNT and league legend Alapag, the well-loved playmaker of the 2000s era, will be against crowd-favorite Barangay Ginebra in a PBA nightcap set at the league’s perennial staging site, Smart Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City.
His third make, the one that will be most remembered, will be the one that most reporters will likely try to capture, and Lassiter is hoping that he could share the moment with Alapag.
“I may have to fly him out [here],” he said with a chuckle. “It’ll be an expensive ticket, but we’ll see. That would be kind of cool.”
Alapag, who holds the record with 1,250 triples made, is based in the United States, serving the Sacramento Kings as an assistant coach.
More efficient
Then playing for Meralco, Alapag became the PBA’s all-time leader on Oct. 9, 2016, at the 4:30 mark of the second period during Game 2 of the championship series against—incidentally—Barangay Ginebra.
An Inquirer check with PBA’s stats chief Fidel Mangonon III shows that Lassiter’s journey toward the PBA milestone has been done with better efficiency.
The San Miguel ace, should he pull it off on Sunday night—needed only 538 games to become the PBA’s finest marksman, 63 games less than Alapag, who accomplished the feat in 601 outings.
“That also means Marcio did it much more quickly,” Mangonon said.
At the doorstep of an extremely rare milestone, Lassiter also spoke of the natural order of things: Records, he stressed, are meant to be broken.
“You know what, there are a lot of guys on my tail, too,” he said with a smile. “LA Tenorio and Paul Lee.”
For as long as the record stands, though, it will always be remembered together with the game it was achieved. So the record watch will begin intently on Sunday when the Beermen take on the Kings and a league mark sits waiting. INQ
